-QUALIFIERS-

(1)  Since the very fact of male and female was a creative act of God and saturates the whole of Scripture and reality to this very day, this article is wholly and without apology Christian. Mutual attraction of the sexes toward love, marriage, and the bearing of children is a creative fact predating and superseding all peoples, all religions, all classes, all history, all continents, and all ages, until it is patently absurd to compare it to modern Hollywood models, which rarely has anything to do with purposely favoring Judo-Christian morality.

(2)  Readers whose minds are pregnant with the Hollywood model may deem this article worthy only a good laugh. So be it, but if such a reader thinks that model will bring enduring happiness, the laugh is on them instead, and not funny at all because of this indelible rule: Only the Christian model has ever worked properly, but only if it was faithfully followed. All other models are guaranteed one or all of the following: Marital unhappiness, regret, mental anguish, troubled children, verbal or physical abuse or both, bondage, ill health, separation, divorce (with all its unbelievable confusion of right and wrong in re-marriage), and perhaps even the loss of one’s soul.

(3)  The topic here is not a teen toy to be treated frivolously or recklessly, if one’s aim in pursuit is to enjoy a life of marital happiness. Just one youthful fling cannot begin to equal the many decades of regret for having squandered the first two. Needless to say, of all the twists, turns, and decisive landmarks of life, one had better get this one right the first time!

(4)  Contrary to Hollywood, any guy whose hormones drive him after girls as his primary pursuit is likely to be in for a self-inflicted beating! God never created His females with a view to have males put them before Himself. (Girls should also remember that). No, in fact God openly admits that He is a “Jealous” God and will not share His glory with another. ( Deuteronomy 5:9, 6:15). Guys, if you get that reversed even a little you are in for some unhappy reaping. Putting God first in your pursuit of a mate is not optional, but a requirement with guaranteed consequences. The simple plan of God is that men pursue  God first, then, in supplying their needs, He in His infinite wisdom and ability sends along a worthy candidate for their consideration. No other rule applies! Get that wrong and you will go wrong—every time! Again, men, if you are in a hormonal drive after skirts you should brace yourself for a great deal of trouble.

(5)  The modern generations, in a society catapulted out of the Hippie Anti-establishment generation, which is heavily promoted by Hollywood and the public school environment, has made heroes and know-it-alls of our children and reduced parents and elders to “out-of-touch” and “old-fashioned” unimportant relics of the past who should “get with it.” Such youth think they have all the answers and that everyone else is just in the way. Consequently, they foolishly engage in their own counsel as they cold-shoulder and spit poison at those whose years of experience in a brutal world has made them wise. Instead of humility, today’s youth possess egos in which pea-size wisdom is inflated to the size of a beach ball. How foolish is that? Such was not the case in former generations. Our mighty America itself was built brick-by-brick by parents and elders who commanded their children after them, not by an undisciplined, disrespectful, bratty generation.

The point is this: Christian guys, if you want to escape a world of hurt in your pursuit of a girl, you’d do well to make it a point to shut your mouth and sit open-eared at the feet of those who have been there and done that and are able to give you insights into how to avoid a Titanic disaster in your young life. Do not be like king Rehoboam and go to the counsel of the youth for answers ( I Kings 12:6-11), but to the counsel of the elders where you can be directed to wisdom. Take heed, young men, come out of your ego-driven, self contained, know-it-all world and ask questions. Lots of them! Especially of those adults in your life who love you, but most especially of God. There is wisdom. If you would be wise, then heed the Lord’s counsel and that of your godly elders and no others, especially your peers, who speak the same language of inexperience of your own little world. King Solomon said, “With all thy getting, get understanding,” (Proverbs 4:7), and the Apostle James said, “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God.” (James 1:5).

Now, with those qualifiers in place, we can deal very pointedly with how Christian guys should pursue girls.

-THE RULES-

RULE 1.  Make it a point to carefully study the Scriptural Genesis model. Get that first rule wrong and you are off to a flying crash dive on the rocks of life. God set the man’s created stage by providing him a female helper equipped for that purpose, and then He set the female’s stage by giving her a male provider equipped for that purpose. That Divine arrangement is the touchstone of humanity which Hollywood hates. Guys, be very careful and cautious to understand this clear base of pursuit, and the logical guidelines it entails. Adam was designed in every way to be the strength, head, and comforter of his family, not the head-ache! Note carefully, that it is his logical place to inspire his chosen female to be his “helper,” exactly the same way a corporate head must inspire his employees to give him their very best. He cannot, must not, brow-beat them into it. He must wisely “inspire” it! He dare not attempt to attract, recruit, and hire an employee by showing and telling them the work is lousy, the boss is a self-centered tyrant, and the pay is not worth it. The word, “inspire” is vital to the entire corporate goal. A better word for our purpose is “courting.” Guys, if you think to pursue that special girl for the purpose of making her your helper, you should understand that to “court” her is indeed the process of “inspiring” her to be your helper, and not someone else’s. And that is exactly what guys do quite naturally. The whole idea is to turn her head your way. If then she says yes to your proposal, SHE THEN BECOMES YOURS TO LOSE! But most guys seem grossly ignorant of the fact that, if after the marriage they stop the “inspiration” that won her in the first place, that lack of inspiration convinces her that you either don’t want or don’t care to have her as your “helper” anymore. If that happens, guys, you’re going to know about it from an unhappy wife! Want proof? Just you let your boss stop the pay raises, becomes unhappy with your work, never inspires you to work for him anymore, and you’ll get a full load of what that helper of yours is feeling. That’s pretty simple to grasp. God made it simple. You’d do well not to start up anything during the courtship that you do not intend doing from then on, and then just see if she’ll agree to be your helper. Don’t blame her, she’s simply being the female God created. Stop watering your rose and it will simply wilt and die right in your hand while you’re holding it—unless she decides to change jobs, if you get my drift.

Your role then, guys, in your pursuit of the girl of your dreams, is to aggressively turn on the inspiration! This is done many ways: Cards, letters, flowers, words of praise for her beauty and abilities, showing intense interest in who she is, her family, and things all about her. Do not talk about yourself unless she asks you. You should persist in this with a view of turning her affections toward you and no one else, and to keep them there. If she shows the tiniest spark of interest in you, even if she is serious about another guy, you are on your way. Remember, unless she flatly tells you to get lost, or she marries the other guy, she is fair game for winning. “All’s fair in love and war” is a true saying. Don’t hold back and be shy, be aggressive. Girls respect that, and are even attracted by it, especially if she’s currently interested in a deadbeat. When you are trying to turn her interests your way, pay no attention to the other guy so long as she responds even a little to your overtures. It is her attention you’re after, not the other guy. Listen carefully, guys; even of that girl is wearing an engagement ring while she is definitely responding to you positively, you are not violating honor to attempt to win her affections. If she is supposed to be yours and not his, you could be saving her, and him, some future heartaches. The guy might not like what you’re doing, but hey, if she were yours now, he’d be watching her, not you, especially if she used to be his. If he threatens fisticuffs because “she’s mine!,” but she is responding to you, tell him to convince her of that. Don’t worry about his fists. All he’s going to do is turn her head more your way. After all, if he makes such threats because he isn’t a Christian and she has lowered herself to date such a man, you should ask if you should pursue this girl in the first place.

RULE 2.  Ask yourself how much it is worth to you to find that dream girl “helper” with which to spend more than half a century. Which would you rather have, the right girl to bring you both joy, or the wrong one to bring you both regret? Or perhaps none at all, to leave you unfulfilled? Well, there is only one way to be assured of finding the right one. LOCK YOUR FULL ATTENTION ON THE PURSUIT OF GOD FIRST, not second or third or not at all. If you by slim chance wind up with the right one without making the pursuit of God first, then you will be one of those extremely rare guys who became the object of God’s mercy. Always, “a marriage made in Heaven” is one where both boy and girl were pursuing God first, whereupon God simply stepped in and beautifully merged them toward a blessed end. Yes, you can be reckless in your pursuit; God will simply allow your own choice to freely function, but you will run blindly into the negative side of the law of sowing and reaping. It’s a law you cannot escape. You simply reap what you sow. All of us do, with absolutely no exceptions. Not even God will prevent the consequences of your stubborn foolishness.

RULE 3.  Give serious, earnest heed to the counsel of your elders who love you. Remember, they are the only ones besides God Himself whom you can trust to tell you the truth! Frankly, ignoring them for the counsel or philosophy of  your young peers is the very height of childish frivolity. You will find no quicker shortcut to sowing, and reaping, bitterweeds. Such reckless behavior can literally end generations of a family who  have traditionally served God. Parents know their own children and what makes them tick. If that is ignored, you have sentenced yourself to discovering it the hard way. Guys, seek counsel about that girl who lights your eyes. Check you pursuit until someone besides yourself evaluates her. If you fail at that, you should brace yourself for some jolting surprises. The biggest fault in today’s youth is to overrate their wisdom. Don’t fall into that trap.

RULE 4.  There is one final point of caution that must be made. The accessibility and availability of virtually anything at all on the Internet has naturally lateraled over to become a huge shopping center for mates. It has become a virtual minefield for predators of every sort, especially sex. Please hear me very carefully, guys: The use of this tool for finding the right girl slams broadside into the highly personal nature of the courtship guideline promoted throughout Scripture. The very first violation is that it eclipses the primary rule of  pursuing God ahead of the girl. That fact makes it a blind, impersonal, back door, sidestepping, shortcut beginning toward an act of exploration. It skips the family interaction that ought to be up front. Emotional ties may be set prematurely, making it difficult to reverse, setting up a temptation to sacrifice one’s standards to own something forbidden. Such a tool is in keeping with the modern convenience of  time-saving curb service, a quick-check brevity that curses the time-tested beauty of romance. It has a falsehood to it, while the real thing has 3-D roots, branches, connections, feelings, emotions, touching, seeing, hearing, person-to-person interaction in the flesh, not merely images, icons and written words. In a word, an internet pursuit bypasses reality. There are just too many ways to fool one another, including the expectations of whole families. It simply is not right. Leaving in the shadows the very ones who love you most cannot be God’s will, and will ruin the innocence in the pursuit. Ours is a cluttered world anyway, but the convenience contrived by our society and the Internet has imprisoned us in lives of solitude even as we exist shoulder to shoulder. Such conditions are a tremendous aid to separation and divorce. Guys, if you wish to find the right girl, you dare not participate in society’s solitary confinement against those who love you, and care what happens to your future.

The subject matter of this article could easily expand into a book, but we must end it. Let me conclude with something Roy’s old sidekick, “Gabby” Hayes might say: “Now listen here, you young whipper-snappers. If you’re gonna catch a young heifer, you better learn how to rope ‘er first!”

DA

There is a line in the movie, Love Comes Softly, in which little Missie says to grown-up Marty, “How did you get to be so old and not know how to do nuthin?” In this metaphor is an amazing human truth. Here we are existing in a world of overwhelming phenomenon of displays so vast, so high, so deep, so complex, so magnificent, bewildering, awesome, altogether a place where we are born, grow to live most of a century, all the time ever learning in an environment sufficient for a thousand or more learning lifetimes, and yet, despite such a fact, most of us are “never able to come to the knowledge of the truth!” Pray tell, how is that even possible?

This is crazy! Besides all the mind-numbing things mentioned above, Christianity alone possesses and promotes the Holy Scriptures, God’s revelation as to who He is, who we are, where we came from, where we’re heading, and precisely how every scrap of reality we hear, see, and experience came to be in the first place. And yet we read that many of us, not a few, are “ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth!” Imagine it! Truth’s reality is so present, relevant, and persistent that it leaves us as road-kill on life’s highway, and yet, for all our learning we still exist in stone ignorance of it! It just seems too bizarre to even think about!

This article will be published on an Internet blog where potentially millions of eyes and ears of all walks of life all over the globe can see and hear life-transforming truths which, applied, would bring peace, joy, and happiness in this life and finally in Heaven itself. And yet all but a tiny fraction of them will say something like, “Hmmmm, interesting. Oh well, off I go to another opinion.” Even that comment itself is very interesting. You see, such a person reads my articles as a gathering of information, much like a carefree person merrily going through the countryside picking flowers,eating berries, sniffing this and that in fascination of the world around them in a sensual experiment of existence, all with a view toward satisfying their inquisitive senses. Perhaps among all the things they touched, smelled, and tasted in such a process, was one item of deadly poison such as hemlock or

some other threat. But having sampled them all, their cluttered mind prevents them from having a clue of which one brought them to ruin. In a very real sense such a person would be “ever learning,” but if just one sampling was deadly, it could also be said they were stone ignorant after all.

Consider, for example, the enormous, impossible complexity of just one American Space Shuttle. Just imagine every tiny screw, rivet, gear, wire, component, panel, and tile, plus all the man hours expended to design and build it, the years of planning, the mountain of paperwork, all the training of the crew, the special fuels to operate it, and on and on. Regardless of all of that, it takes just one tiny flaw in one tiny tile to incinerate it all in a split second in a fiery streak across the night sky. All is lost because of just one tiny mistake, perhaps by a worker who foolishly took a shortcut in workmanship in order to get off early and attend a party.

Friends, when it comes to the human soul, though, all of the above pales in comparison to the eternal loss of just one of them, due to a simple failure to act on just one vital spiritual truth. It matters not one whit what the reason for the failure may be. A loss is a loss, and in this case one cannot shrug, get over it, and go on. The loss is a fiery streak across eternity that never burns out! So declare the Scriptures in plain language for all to read and consider. Those truths are not optional nor negotiable in any degree. It is just one way or nothing. As one minister puts it, “God is not saying, ‘lets make a deal.’ He’s saying, ‘This is the deal.’” If he’s right, then nothing else matters. It is time to quit sampling, smelling, tasting, and feeling, and start eating something in which there’s nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Having made that point, let us ask why there are so many “ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.” The answer is in the context of that passage of Scripture. II Timothy 3:1-9 speaks of a “last days” list of human characteristics. I urge the reader to read them. We see there utter selfishness at work. “Lovers of their own selves…unthankful, unholy…proud…without natural affection…despisers of those that are good…lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God…having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof…” But the striking truth here is that Paul is addressing the character of troublemakers that have invaded the church! Look around us; never in all church history was this more true than right now!

How, then, does this play out in reality before our very eyes? Here’s how: Consider first of all that “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18). Such selfish vanity feasts on the craving to be seen and heard. The global movie industries, especially Hollywood, enjoy a flood of wealth in offering icons for viewers whose vanity is unfulfilled, and so they identify vicariously with trained fakers. Identical to this, sports venues also offer vicarious fulfillment to those addicted to the games. This belongs to those “Lovers of pleasures” in Paul’s epistle to Timothy.

Today’s society is glutted with couch potatoes, movie goers, video gamers, book-aholics, faithful followers of the television Discovery, News, and Education channels, besides rabidly absorbing their lives with computers and the world wide Internet. A favorite among them is every form of pornography, readily available. Truly, this is the epitome of “ever learning,” but of things that can never bring them “to the knowledge of the truth.” Instead, such venues contribute heavily to being “lovers of their own selves,” to the mind of being, “unthankful, unholy,” to being “proud,” to being, “without natural affection.” A multitude in the church are guilty of these, and so sit in church with, “a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof.” Sadly, especially the church youth through such exposure and peer pressure become well educated to be “despisers of those that are good,” meaning serious Christians, elders, parents, and anyone else who try to maintain a standard of godliness and holiness in a wicked world, and so suffer persecution from the very souls they care most about.

And so the secret of ignorance exists with those who engage in one or all of that, then sit around jawing about it in an egotistical “form of godliness,” without having humbly dropped before God’s throne as dead in a pitiful heap! This in spite of the fact that every last one of us have absolutely nothing to brag about when we consider who we are, where we were dragged from, and just how utterly helpless we were until God in His mercy had His only begotten, holy, spotless Son brutally slaughtered on our behalf, and delivered us from an eternal doom in Hell. There is absolutely no place in God’s Kingdom for starched britches, fused spines, nor prideful, selfish, debating boneheads! We must be humble, clean, repentant. We must be meek, lovers of God, and really, I say REALLY, feel ourselves to be as Paul put it, “Less than the least of all the saints” (Ephesians 3:8), in which Paul, in the Greek, stacked the comparative case on the superlative case to describe how utterly low-down he felt before God.

So let me ask this: Do you honestly know enough about the secret of ignorance to avoid it? Or are you one of it’s practitioners? You cannot hide the answer to that question—God is listening carefully to YOU!

DA

I lived this story. I wept as I wrote it a number of years ago, and even now I cannot read it without the tears welling in my eyes. The editor who published it a number of years ago said it was “How a boy—with the help of a loving dad and a loyal dog—learned about war, work, and the costs of freedom.”

At an early age I had a fascination for cameras. I used a couple of dollars of my cotton-picker money to order a little Donald Duck camera from The Johnson Smith Company. Incredibly, it took good pictures. I still have all the pictures I took with it, with the negatives! Among them are some precious shots of my dog, the hero of my story. The photo illustrations are from my Donald Duck camera, except the artists rendering at the beginning.

****

My Daddy was wounded in the Argonne, so he already knew about war. Now, with four motherless sons beside a mountain of troubles he had anyway, here loomed the hardships of a bigger one.

He looked to the promises of the American West. Some said the farmers out there had cotton patches hard to see across, producing up to four bales to the acre. A vast country, they said, with plenty of elbow room. Why, out there, he reasoned, a man might break some of his fetters.

The Japanese bombs of far-away Pearl had fallen on every American. Like chain leashes they fell on our necks and anchored each of us to unpleasantries or led us away to worse. Remember Pearl Harbor stickers were yet on windows when Daddy gathered us four boys and left Oklahoma in an overloaded worn-out sedan.

Nine years old and youngest, I faced with every American those savage years. Everyone suffered in some way; for us it was living in board shacks, flea-infested sheep stalls, tool sheds and adobe cockroach hovels, besides the cotton patches, fruit orchards and expansive garlic fields.

Our more respected occupational title would have been Migrant Workers; local citizens frequently castigated us as “fruit tramps”. All of these negatives were more than my proud, steel-structured father could equate. Like every other American, I needed a counterbalance. I was too young to realize it, but Daddy knew.

So one memorable day in my life while Hitler was wasting Europe and the Japanese were enslaving the people of the Pacific where my oldest brother now served below the water line of an embattled aircraft carrier, a friend came over leading a lively puppy on a cotton-cord leash and said I could have him. I fell for him immediately. Oddly then, though no mystery now, Daddy agreed to it–with the understanding that, “He’ll be your dog, so you gotta look after ‘im”.

I asked my friend if he had named him yet, and he said, “Yeah, I call ‘im Possum”, whereupon the pup cast me a pitiful glance. So I renamed him Tip for the sprig of white on the tip of his tail.

We became fast friends from the start, and he quickly became an indispensable part of our belongings. Strangely, our separate lives and individual hurts somehow found strength in this bit of canine. Yes, he was my dog, but he was our common interest. We all missed my brother a lot, especially Daddy who knew the risks of combat. As a family, we would each pet tip’s gentle head from time to time and anticipate a grand reunion after the war.

The war months and years rolled and Tip grew, but our difficult and often close-quartered lifestyle burdened him with something he would never outgrow: That little cotton cord leash grew with him to become his chain. It took a chain to curb his insatiable appetite for chasing cars. The school grounds were forbidden to him. The only answer to his insistence on following me there was a chain. The complaints of close neighbors invariably resulted in a chain. If dogs can hate, I saw it in Tip for that terrible chain, although much of his lifetime would be tethered to one.

Increasingly, moves wearied my aging father. A farmer at heart, he was tied to the pull of other men’s harvests. No doubt the homing instinct rose with his years, and he longed for the Oklahoma hills to where he would finally return. But when the time would come for us to move to new harvests, the question never came up whether Tip was to accompany us. Car, train, bus, no matter how we traveled, Daddy made sure Tip was properly cared for. He became proficient at building transport cages.

Full grown, Tip was medium size, resembling a small Coyote, with the sleekness and speed of a Greyhound. Regardless of heavy feedings, his ribcage showed. His breath was atrocious, his bark was deafening, but he could run like the wind. I was an ambitious boy and he was a lively dog. Our mutual friendship intertwined until we were inseparable.

True to the times, he was a fighter. In fact, that was the only thing about him in which he chose to totally ignore me. I suppose he reckoned a good scrap as simply great sport. He positively loved it. His unexpected tactic of sudden withdrawal and quick re-engagement always took his opponent by surprise and got him the victory every time. I honestly don’t recall that he was ever defeated,even by some much larger dogs. I worried that he might be injured seriously by indulging in such hazardous sport, especially so frequently, so I chained him as often as it seemed necessary. But it never waned his fighting spirit for his victory medal to be only those dreaded links of iron.

Sickness and casualties were common in the lifestyle we led. Boils, flu, cuts and bruises were daily fare. Tip suffered severe injury once by a car as he bolted across the highway to engage a large canine opponent who trotted along proudly as if Tough was his name. I have no doubt Tip could have licked the dog, but not the car.

I told Daddy about it when he came home from the field. He always seemed instinctively wise about ailments in people or animals. He diagnosed his own bronchial condition as a reaction from cotton dust, but I now suspect it was from breathing poison gas on another field. He examined Tip and said he was badly battered, but he would probably be all right. Sure enough, Tip was his old self in a few days. But sick as he was, I had to curb his thirst for adventure by chaining him until he recovered.

The war finally ended and a devastated world turned again toward peace and order. Weary lives were released to won freedom, families reunited. We were all relieved when my brother returned safely from the Pacific, but Daddy seemed especially eased.

In the springtime we moved to Maricopa, Arizona where Daddy contracted with a cotton grower to hoe what seemed to me at the time to be half the state of Arizona. It was a wide, flat country with blue mountains in the distance. Our “house” was a small tool shed made of corrugated iron which barely held our few belongings. We lived, ate and slept outside under the stars. Fetters no longer held us; we all ran freely, laughed a lot, earned our wages and wagged tails. That’s where Tip found fulfillment with a shaggy haired female with whom he left six pups. Yes, we lived life to the fullest out there, having learned indelibly that the good things of life can be fleeting.

In March of 1947 one of my brothers married, and they decided on Fort Worth, Texas, as the place to rear their family. The rest of us were to follow when school was out, so Tip was sent with them to avoid Daddy having to build another transport cage. The last time I saw Tip was through the back window of a 1937 Ford sedan as it pulled away. Leashed to the doorpost, he looked at me solemnly as the car turned onto the highway and disappeared from view.

Two months later I read the sad contents of a letter from my brother; Tip, unhappy with his city chain, caused such disturbance they had to release him. He ran freely for two weeks then disappeared. That had been a month ago and he was still missing. They were sorry, but felt certain we would not see him again.

Somehow I realized then that Tip’s chain would not have been necessary for a farm dog in Oklahoma. Tip was another casualty. Now he was gone forever, and I sorely missed him. I rode my bicycle to a quiet place in the park and wept over the loss of a very dear friend.

When I gave Daddy the news, as I now recall, it seems a little more of the frustration of those four violent years eased out of him. He just looked quietly out the window for a minute then said, “They did right lettin’ him go, Son. Out here it was yours and his chain, but without you along it warn’t nothin’ but cold iron. Tip died a free dog. Nobody oughta settle for less.”

I suppose that was the lesson those flaming years forged into my generation: Some chains are necessary, but there are chains that must be steadfastly resisted at all costs.

Tip was running freely on instinct when he fell victim to the dangers of the big city. The ravages of time finally overcame Daddy, but not without resistance; he died at the age of ninety-one, and nearly to the end he was on his feet and on his own.

Dear to my heart will ever be the discipline of those Arizona cotton fields and Tip and my Daddy and America. Nobody oughta settle for less, chain or no chain.
–DA

This weakness involved me in a comedy. I worked while mud daubers whizzed by my ears, over my head, close under my nose and between my legs. They collided with me, dropping their mud balls or spiders on my clean upholstery. Meanwhile, two or three might be perched on an upturned chair, another sitting on my shoulder, another riding my arm, another my stomach, all of them twisting their button heads this way and that, watching me work. They seemed to be trying to understand this alien intruder who chose their quarters for such odd goings on. Changing shifts occasionally, they continued their miniature investigation until all seemed satisfied that my presence was permissible.

Meanwhile, the shocking news reached the dense spider population. Terrified, they cowered back into corners, built webs in obscure places, or left outright. The brave hangers-on who previously ambled nonchalantly across open spaces, now took exposes in a flash. Overcome with curiosity, I decided to research the subject. Our set of Encyclopedia Americana got caught in the overflow from our tight-quartered mobile home and joined me in the shop. My fingers ran along the spines, K… L…”M” for mud daubers. Grasping the volume, I… but it was stuck tight. A flashlight revealed that a huge mud dauber nest had it welded to the rear of the bookcase! It loosened stubbornly and I turned to my subject: “Any one of a number of nonsocial wasps of the genus Scelipheron of the family Sphecidae. The females work up ­mud with their saliva, forming a clay with which they build tubular cells which they attach, sometimes on top of one another, to the woodwork of buildings or to stone. When a tube is completed, they paralyze small spiders or insects with their stings and fill the tube with them. laying their eggs in the spiders so that the larvae will have fresh food. The males apparently die soon after mating.” (1961 ed.)

Interesting. I could have researched further, but since by now I was so personally involved with them, I wasn’t sure I wanted an entomologists cold explanations. Early death of the males meant my friends were all widowed mothers. Knowing who was building where, I doled out names for each . The one in the bookcase became Mildred. While doing paperwork at my makeshift desk, I sat squarely in her path to the window. “Buzzzzzz” right under my nose.” Whizzzzzz” past my ear; “peck” into the side of my head, dropping her mud ball on my paperwork. Honestly, it seemed she was distracting me every minute. Deciding to time her, I looked at my watch as she flitted by me and out the window for another mud ball. I looked again when she whizzed by my ear. Exactly sixty seconds. Again I checked her. Sixty seconds. Thinking it coincidental, I checked her several times that day, but each time at exactly fifty-nine seconds I could simply look up and, with absolute precision, she’d be there! I checked some of the others too, and though their trip lengths were individually different, each was equally precise to the second. Oh, how I envied such discipline!

Our crowded quarters meant courtesy was the order of the day. If I met Hazel or Maxine in the line of duty, a moment of hesitation came before courteously moving around each other. Often I would open the door to leave, only to meet Hazel face to face with no more than a few inches between our noses. Usually we would have the standard sidewalk mix-up, both of us moving left or right at the same time. We finally settled on a system where Hazel would hover, I would stop, then she would fly slowly and carefully around my head. She left no doubt in my mind that her unstartled movement as she passed my ear said “Thank you!”

A closed window created frenzied terror for other insects. They couldn’t cope with a see-but-can’t-go situation, so they would thrash themselves all day long on the glass and end up as carcasses on the ledge. But not Mildred; lighting gingerly on the glass, she would immediately head for the nearest hole. This led to my discovery that these shrewd little females could, apparently by sheer intuition, shortly find the most obscure hole in a closed room, even if it was the only hole!

Christine surely brought concern to her peers. By some freak of nature she failed to posses initial know-how for building a nest. Not that she didn’t have courage to try. Picking a grand spot for it in an obscure corner, she then proceeded to smear mud all over everything. She strung it up the wall, built silly nodular topsy-turvies, flattened some out like pancakes thrown against the wall, she even tried to build a bazaar little nest on the end of a string I left dangling from the wall! Evidently the rumors fairly buzzed about her. I think they took her aside and instructed her in the fine art of mud molding, because she finally got it together in late August and built a fine little pod, poked a few spiders in it, laid an egg, and left. I couldn’t fault her on such ineptness; that’s about how I started my upholstery business..

On to Cleo. If Christine was inept, Cleo was downright strange. Her flight was weird, nervous, even sounded different. High pitched, it matched her other eccentric behaviors. Once established, mud daubers always fly an indelible route, no matter how odd it might be, but Cleo’s was purely ridiculous, just no reason for it. She would whiz through the window with her mud ball (skimming my hair, kicking it up in her wake), fly to the middle of the shop, hover, settle to the floor like a tiny helicopter, then set out on foot! Although she had ample room to fly the distance, she ran at breakneck speed about ten feet across the floor and vanished under a chest of drawers. This antic never failed to put a smile on my face. During the dash she leaned sharply forward, her tiny legs pumping like pistons, wings held high in dignity as though she was a proper lady holding her skirts tidily aloft while she engaged in a somewhat undignified sport. Reappearing, she would immediately take flight, spiral upward, then dart out the window. This illogical absurdity went on all summer.

But there’s more on Cleo. Some sort of comical fly waited on a ledge for her to appear, then he launched himself like a shot, tailing her across the room about two inches directly behind her. When she hovered to the floor he landed on a shelf and politely waited for her exit. Again he tailed her, landed on the window ledge and waited for her return. It happened at great speed, for Cleo was no slowpoke. In fact, I had to be quick to observe it, usually held to only a glance; but when I was quick enough, there flew the little booger, zipping along behind as though water skiing on an invisible hair. Why? Beats me. I’ll bet an entomologist would say he was an egg thief or something. Maybe. But I like to think he was simply enthralled with her beauty, the most glorious creature he’d ever seen, and he simply couldn’t help himself. But it was a short-lived affair; he failed to show up one day. I figure he broke his neck chasing her.

By mid-October we had all seen a busy summer. A sad time as well, for mud daubers live only a few months. I was sitting at my desk when Mildred landed on the desk just inches in front of me. Quite naturally, as though she were a person, with chin-in-hand I began a line of small talk.
“How are you today, Mildred?”
“Weather’s getting colder, isn’t it?”
“You’re looking tired, Mildred; better slow down.”

During my discourse, her little head would turn toward me, then she would turn it the other way as though looking longingly out the window, toward me again, now back to the window, then back to me, as though listening to every word. Suddenly she settled her full body to the desk, breast to tail, stretched all of her legs straight out, and gently laid her head forward until her mouth rested on the desk. How very strange! There she lay totally relaxed while I rattled on. At first I thought it a little ill mannered, her going off to sleep while I was talking, but I decided not to disturb her, knowing that in those few moments we were savoring both fellowship and kinship, both enjoying a wonder of our native planet–the breath of life pulsing in each of us. But hers grew short. Then, as though sensing the end of our warm encounter, she quickly drew herself upright and flew out the window.

A few days later I found her little body on the floor by my desk. I picked her up and turned her over in my palm. What a beautiful, fantastically designed tiny creature! Yet she had seemed so personally close to my own existence.

In self-surprise, I realized that I loved these little friendly, obscure creatures. Suddenly I remembered Mildred’s apartment house. She had bequeathed to my trust her progeny, perpetuating our friendship! Excited, I collected all the nests I could find in hazardous places in the shop and stacked them together on a high shelf, forming an enormous condominium complex.

The following spring, out burst my little friends in fresh life, chasing spiders and filling my day with friendship and entertainment, all over again.

You know, I would be remiss if I failed to point out the spiritual lesson in this true story. Acts 1:8 says, “…and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.” Some believe God Himself will mysteriously get this done in His own good time and Providence, forgetting that these words were His command to His church to get it done by going in the power of His Holy Spirit. If we name the name of Christ, we have a Divine commission He expects us to keep, even as we sit idle waiting for Him to do it. He waits for us to obey, as we wait for Him to do our job for us, instead of inviting Him into our lives to get it done through us.

The lesson is this: Inadequate as we all are in our own strength, God expects us to take Him into our separate, distinctive personalities and do the singular task of telling every willing soul on earth the glorious truth of Divine salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ. No one is exempt. We may feel inept, like Christine, and smear our little ball of mud in crazy ways, or be like Cleo who wastes much time crawling when she could fly the distance. We might be like Hazel or Maxine, whose courtesy to a fault prevents them from forging ahead into the unknown, or like so many who sit on the pastor’s arm, or shoulder, or stomach, listening to and observing interminably as to who he is and what he’s about, but never putting what he says to use. Yes, and like Mildred, who glued the Book to the shelf, never finding out what’s in it.

But God made each of us separately, and He will judge us the same way. We used to sing an old Gospel song entitled, “Right In The Corner Where You Are.” May we all ask ourselves that question: What am I doing in my own little corner?
–DA

The trap is in how we think about it. We want to treat it in a straight line of past and present without mixture. How often have we heard the saying, “The past is the past, so let’s forget the past and look to the future”? Such is the stuff of New Year’s resolutions. We fail to consider that our past behavior is the very reason we resolve to behave in a different manner. Worse, we fail to seriously consider that as we launch and practice our new behavior we have to deal with last year’s behavior! It is by no means a simple matter.

It is also erroneous thinking to assume sowing is something we consciously work up and execute, as if there was a choice of whether to sow or not sow. No, just being consciously alive is sowing. Dead people no longer sow; the living cannot avoid it. We all sow. God has created time for us, a parenthesis in eternity, if you will, wherein the one and only option given us is the “what” of sowing, not “whether” to sow. Sowing and reaping, after all, is a God-created fixture of nature. It is the scientist’s cause and effect. It is our Creator’s process of natural selection by humanity’s gift of free choice. There is no better example of this than our modern grocery market. Every edible item in there is the product of sowing and reaping, with the heaviest emphasis on the chosen quality of what to sow, with a view to please those who judge it for desirability. It is phenomenal that people shop there amid such an illustration, but fail to apply it’s vital principles to our own lives.

Perhaps the reason is that thinking of it in depth strains our mental processes. You see, when it comes to God’s law of sowing and reaping, we would do well to bear in mind that God’s law fixes it so that the past and the present join hands in a perpetual meeting. As we daily live our lives, our past refuses to be left behind, and after we pass it, then, just when we thought we were through with it, it races by us and meets us from the future! The result is that in the identical time element that we are sowing, we are also reaping! Such is the stark realism of God’s law of sowing and reaping.

Quite naturally, detractors will object that when God forgives our sordid past He “casts it into His sea of forgetfulness,” they say,  to be remembered against us no more. Yes, that is an absolute truth of Scripture, although that quote is not a Scripture (there are many others with that meaning, such as Psalm 103:12). However, let us understand this. He is speaking of our sin against His Person. Yes, through salvation He wipes the slate clean of what separated us from His favor, but we go wrong in failing to consider that God’s forgiveness does not negate His established physical law of sowing and reaping. That might surprise many saints of God. However, I think we can all see that past recklessness in sin can create conditions that extend past salvation, all the way to our deathbed. A drunken spree can kill innocent people, resulting in a lifetime of regret. A poison tongue can make a lifelong enemy. Children, aborted, born out of wedlock, or maimed for life out of uncontrolled anger, is a painful memory. We only fool ourselves if we think our past sowing of thorns will not produce thorns to torment us, even if we cease sowing thorns and begin sowing wheat. Thus, with the blessings of the wheat, we must also deal with the thorns. Things will improve with time, of course, as we sow good seeds, but some thorns can needle us for a lifetime.

However, there is far more to this than we seem to think. You see, even though we receive God’s forgiveness for past sins, as we live in His forgiveness we may purposely or unknowingly sow questionable seeds. However, the manner or quality does not matter at all to God’s law of sowing and reaping, any more than it makes any difference as to the degree of our disobedience to His law of gravity. He causes His rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike (Matthew 5:45). Perhaps the deadliest seed Christians sow is pride, preventing us from rising to faith, but forcing us into alternate explanations to justify a lower level of faith. One familiar quote coming from this is, “If it be thy will,” which in itself is bad seed that must be reaped. We cannot reap from the God of the impossible what pride has determined that He denied us. We must therefore live with that lack. This same God promised His people, Israel, that if they sowed righteous seed, He would give to them, “As the days of Heaven on earth” (Deut. 11:21). Instead, they chose to sow bad seed and so reaped thorns—even as they claimed favor with God!

Another aspect of God’s law of sowing and reaping is the misconception that it is an individual matter. Perhaps it will emphasize that error if we see sowing and reaping from the purely physical law of cause and effect. A violent storm, for instance, is not just an individual matter, although it is that, but a city matter, or a state matter or, as it was with hurricane Katrina, a national matter. However, the difference between the law of physics and that of the spiritual is in the cause of it. The direct cause of a tsunami is not human ingenuity, but the devastation of war is. Adolf Hitler came to power at the will of the German people. A devious mayor can wreck a city; a corrupt father can bring a curse to his family, and a minister’s bad doctrine can poison the minds of one church or a whole denomination, and more. Yes, sowing and reaping blesses or curses individuals, families, cities, states, and nations. It can change a whole lifetime, national history, and even the final record of accomplishment of the entire planet. All of this through God’s law of sowing and reaping where the whole process balances on our own choice of the quality of what we sow. Again, we must sow, and what we reap depends exactly on our own choice of what to sow. So states the law, “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

Another objection surely to be mentioned is Paul’s statement that when we accept God’s offer of salvation, we are then a new creature and, “Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2nd Corinthians 5:17). Yes, this is absolutely true of our spiritual being, but certainly not of our physical existence here in God’s world of sowing and reaping. Otherwise, at our salvation our new creature would spiritually and physically, instantly be perfection on the same order of Adam and Eve before they sinned. No, even Paul never made such a claim. In that verse, then, Paul meant a rebirth of our spirit, soul, and body, but our bodies must wait for the physical resurrection before we realize complete perfection. Until then, our redeemed spirit must make the perpetual decision to sacrifice our physical body to righteous living as we daily walk in the Spirit and not in the flesh (See Romans 8).

For these very reasons Christians of the past separated themselves from the world, even as they lived and worked among them, so as to sow good seed and to perpetuate it by teaching it to their children. Any person, family, church, city, or nation who fails at this have sown bad seeds and must reap thorns, as surely as gravity will grab the feet of anyone who leaps from a great height under the false notion that they can avoid the fall.

Therefore, in light of these things, how, exactly, should one sow and how should one reap? In answer to this question, never let it slip that we do not have the option of “if” we sow. If we have a pulse, we absolutely must sow and we absolutely must reap.

Sowing must be the first consideration because if we would change the quality of the harvest we must alter what we are sowing. What, exactly, is the one and only existing key to sowing good seed? It is this: We can only change our sowing by coming to recognize good seed. Friends, that is no easy matter. Back to the grocery store example: Just how do we think those quality, salable products reached those shelves? Like this: Hard work, dedication, study, diligence, testing, patience, careful observation, and plain old hard-earned experience. That’s how! It doesn’t happen overnight. It doesn’t happen through loose living, compromise and absenteeism. All of that is required for the walk in the Spirit instead of the flesh. We must force ourselves to sow against fleshly appetites for sensual pleasures. That walk does not come naturally, and so we must “Study to show thyself approved unto God, rightly dividing the Word of truth” (2nd Timothy 2:15). As Dr. D. James Kennedy wisely observed, “If you don’t study God’s Word, then I don’t know what you’re doing in church, for that’s what the church is all about.” We can sow seed that pleases God no other way at all, and only that seed produces a desirable crop.

How then should we reap? Again, bear in mind that reaping is not an option. We absolutely must reap even as we sow. Of course, reaping the fruits of good seed is a joy, but there are always those bad seeds we sowed earlier, which we must reap along with the good. Jesus called the bad crop “tares” which grew along with the wheat. He explained that they must grow together until the final harvest (judgment day) when they will all be reaped together, the wheat to be saved but the tares to be burned (Matthew 13). The lesson He taught is that both wheat and tares are a reality of life with which we must live. The context from which he drew this speaks of the importance of always sowing good seeds regardless of the tares that trouble us.

So here is the lesson we must learn if we expect to live the Christian life successfully: Our first and most crucial task is always to continue sowing good seed in the face of a bad crop which is always in the way and cripples us. We are to press forward in faith, calling upon God for strength and healing to overcome evil with good, and do it in all areas of our lives. Fainting at that is to discontinue sowing good seed, and to fall back on sowing bad seed—all of which we must reap! This can never be done through doctrinal compromise, or going along to get along in any way. It is a fight to the death until death, all the way, and never lets up. We must, as a godly pastor once said, “fight the Devil as long as I have strength, then bite him as long as I have teeth, then gum him until I die!” We must go ahead and take the beating, but then get up from the mud and go right back to sowing and reaping.

One final aspect of sowing: The planting of good seed is always self-sacrificing and blind. We sow for the purpose of reaping a good crop, but we ourselves might never see its fruits in this life. Therefore, we should simply sow out of love for God just because it is the right thing to do for Him, even if it appears that we sowed in vain. After all, God only equipped us to sow, not to germinate the seed and make it grow. God Himself will see to that in due season (“…but it is God that giveth the increase.” 1st Corinth. 3:6,7). It is especially important to keep these vital rules of sowing in mind when we sow into our youth activities, into our romances, into our marriage, into our offspring, into our health, into our employment, or into our politics, for therein lies the greatest potential for reaping ruin—usually sooner than we think. —DA