All About Families, December 30, 1996


	Volume 1 Number 49 December 30, 1996 Norman Bales, Editor CONTENTS Just Visiting Feature Study - The Road We Have Travelled Just Visiting I'm actually composing these words several days prior to the time you see them. Ann and I have plans to spend the holidays with our oldest son, his wife and our two grandchildren. I have asked our faithful tech manager, Vic Phares, to see that the newsletter gets into your hands. With Christmas behind us, our attention turns to the New Year. Many of you will be making resolutions. Despite the fact that most resolutions end up getting broken, I believe it's a healthy thing to give thought to changes we want to make in our lives. To facilitate that process, I want to encourage you to take a look back down the road you travelled in 1996 and then think about the changes you want to make for the New Year. Norman The Road We Have Travelled by Norman Bales INTRODUCTION Our tradition encourage us to look backward as well as forward at the end of the year. The changing of the calendar is a time of introspection, evaluation, reflection. It's time to take stock of our resources and get ourselves mentally revved up to take another run at a year of living. Before you jump off the cliff, it might be a good time to look back down the road you've been travelling. I'm not asking you to do this so you can rest on the laurels of past achievement if the year went well. Neither am I urging you to pull old skeletons out of the closet and beat yourself over the head because you made some dumb mistakes during the past twelve months. I'm asking you to take inventory, so you can assess the need for change. If you took the right roads during 1996, I want to urge you to think about improving those roads. If you ended up on some dead end roads, maybe you'll want to explore travelling on some different roads in 1997. SOME QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF Did the road you travelled lead you to contentment? Did your road lead to success? If the road led to success, how much was the toll? Was the toll too high? Did the road improve your relationship with your family? Did the road lead you closer to God? Did the road lead you away from God? Did you grow as a person while you travelled your chosen road? Did the road lead you in the direction of cynicism and despair? HOW CAN WE MEASURE PROGRESS? Someone has said, "time is the stuff of which life is made." If the road is time, we can't measure progress in terms of distance. Several years ago, the Iowa Department of Transportation posted an electronic sign on Interstate 80 just outside Des Moines. Just before passing under that sign, motorists saw a digital readout recording their exact rate of speed as they travelled. It's one thing to see your speed recorded on the speedometer, but it's something else again to have it recorded in two foot letters for all the world to see. I want to suggest that signs have been posted to help us gauge our progress. A few of them are listed below. THE FIRST SIGN - TIME IS A GIFT In the movie On Golden Pond, Jane Fonda played the part of a middle aged daughter at odds with her aging father, played by her real life father, Henry Fonda. Her character's name was Chelsea. Chelsea had a chip on her shoulder. She sarcastically expressed her resentment to her mother (a part that won Kathryn Hepburn an Academy Award). Her mother slapped her and said, "Life is getting on; why don't you get on with it? Chelsea, your father is nearly eighty years old. When are you going to establish a relationship with him?" Good question. The script writer understood that we don't have an unlimited supply of time. From a Biblical perspective, time is a gift from God. Job understood that better than most. When his resources were depleted and his children were all taken from him in one terrible catastrophe, he said, "Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked I will depart. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised" (Job 1:21). Most of us assume that we have an unlimited supply of time. When we have put family relationships on the back burner, we don't really plan to damage the family. We just have more pressing things to do right then. We think there will be plenty of time yet to take care of building family relationships. Many people, like Chelsea, reach middle age with broken commitments and unfulfilled relationships, chasing all kinds of rainbows that don't matter much in the long run, while ignoring the blessings in our back yards. It isn't very becoming of us and it's extremely presumptuous. Time is a gift. James reminds us "Now listen, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.' Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, 'If it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that'" (James 4:13-15). THE SECOND SIGN THE ROAD'S LENGTH IS UNKNOWN This season of the year reminds me of Cathy. My wife, Ann, rode to work with Cathy every day for about four years. Cathy was a generous, loving and thoughtful person who demonstrated her compassion in many different way to the people whose lives she touched. Eleven years ago, she dropped by our house a couple of days before Christmas to share some pastry she had baked for the season. Cathy spent the whole time in our laundry room. We had an outside entrance there. Normally, I wouldn't have gone to the laundry room to visit. After all, she was Ann's friend. For some unexplained reason, the thought came to me that I needed to go to the laundry room and visit with Cathy. We wished Cathy a Merry Chrismas and said "good bye" with cheerful laughter not realizing we would never see her alive again. She worked on Christmas eve and left immediately after work in order to spend Christmas day with her mother. She was scheduled to work the day after Christmas and left her mother's house long before dawn in order to be at work by 7:00 A. M. En route to work, her car skidded on a patch of ice. She slammed into a semi and her life was ended. Cathy was 33 years old. Time is a fluid commodity. You can't put it in storage and plan to use it later on. You exercise a decision as to how you will use your time, but once that is done, you can't undo the decision. In one of the late Jim Croce's songs, he wished he could have "Time in a Bottle," but one might as well wish for wings. In view of the fact that our decisions about time are irrevocable and we never know how much of it, we have left shouldn't we use it carefully. I'll always be glad I visited with Cathy in the laundry room that evening and I'm glad she spent her last day on this earth with her mother. She had no idea that time would run out so soon, but she used what seemed to be an ample amount of time doing the things that mattered. In his suffering, Job observed "Man born of woman is of few days and full of trouble. He springs up like a flower and withers away; like a fleeting shadow, he does not endure" (Job 14:1-2) He understood the brevity of life. It's important to make good use of the moments in time we possess. The most important term in the human vocabulary with regard to time is the word, "now." Paul wrote, 2 Corinthians 6:2 ". . . . now is the time of God's favor, now is the day of salvation. " If you plan to work on improving your relationship with your spouse, now is the time to begin. If you need to spend more time with your children, start right now. If you need to call an aging parent, a special aunt or uncle, pick up the phone and do it today. "I expect to pass through this world but once; any good therefore that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it for I shall not pass this way again." - Stephen Grellett - 1773 -1855. THIRD SIGN - AVOID THE SIDE ROADS Do you remember Harry Chapin's song "The Cat's in the Cradle?" He couldn't pay attention to his son because the pressures of business were too great to answer his young son's request for time alone with Dad. But there was a noble impulse underneath, that said I need to do it, but then he could always do it later, so he would tell the boy, "We'll have a good time then, son." Eventually father and son traded places. Dad was old and wanted to spend time with his son, but son was out chasing rainbows in the commercial world. Thus Dad heard his own words repeated to him, "We'll have a good time, then Dad. We'll have a good time then" Things like that happen because we get off the main road in life and chase dreams down the side roads. Some of the roads look attractive, while others look mandatory. Our desire to travel the main road in life is complicated by pressures exerted as the result of persuasive appeals from other people. One set of demands comes from the work place. Another comes from the school. Still another emanates from the community. The government wants you to invest an enormous amount of time, keeping records to report on those annual income tax forms which will be appearing in your mailbox very shortly. Even churches want blocks of our time and various ministry leaders in the church compete with each other for the right to the slice of time you have to offer. It is extremely important for us to maintain a set of priorities. Those priorities are outlined in Matthew 22:37-38 "`Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. Matthew 22:39 And the second is like it: `Love your neighbor as yourself.'" Loving God is your number 1 priority in life. There's a tremendous temptation to rationalize, "But God's not pushing me like all the people who want a segment of my attention. I'll 'oil the wheel that squeaks' for right now and just as soon as I'm able to meet all the demands of people, then I'll concentrate on building my relationship with God." When you think that way, you've got your priorities reversed and with priorities reversed, you'll probably never get around to serving God, because people and their demands will always be there. How well did you respond to that number 1 priority in 1996? A second priority is relationship building with other people. Loving your neighbor involves sensitivity, caring, burden bearing, giving encouragement, etc. There is no relationship in society that deserves our love and concern more than the family. Consider the following ways that society benefits from stable families. It's in the family that we find love. It's in the family that we develop values. It's in the family that we learn loyalty to one another. It's in the family that we learn how to get along with people. It's in the family that we find safety. How much did you give attention to your second priority in 1996? CONCLUSION Finally, some questions and a closing quotation. WHAT ROADS DID YOU TRAVEL IN 1996? DID YOU PAY ATTENTION TO THE SIGNS? IF YOU STAY ON THAT SAME ROAD WHERE ARE YOU GOING TO END UP? WHERE DOES YOUR ROAD TERMINATE? Now for a closing quotation. It comes from a friend, Dr. Carl Brecheen. Carl and Dr. Paul Faulkner have conducted Marriage Enrichment Seminars all across the country. Carl describes the Bible as "a road map from the king, designed to get us to the palace instead of the garbage dump." If your road leads to the garbage dump, isn't it time to consult the road map? * * * * If you have questions about marriage and family relationships you can "ASK THE COUNSELOR." We will select questions to be answered in the newsletter. Address your questions to Mikal Frazier. Her address is mikalfraz@aol.com NEXT WEEK'S FEATURE ARTICLE: "What Falling Leaves Taught Me About Marriage"