Wallow

ByHal Hammons

When I feel ill, all I want to do is wallow.  Just sit and groan.  It’s not a cry for attention — usually I’m alone when I make my pathetic whimpers of discomfort.  I’m feeling sorry for myself.  It’s pathetic, but at least it’s private.  As we say in my family, “If you’re going to die, die quietly.”

In the end, I always feel better — emotionally if not physically, and frequently both — if I make some sort of deliberate effort at accomplishing something.  I can read my Bible.  I can come up with a bulletin article (like this one).  Even if it is just coming up with a plan for how to catch up later on, I am not wasting my time.

Wallowing, in my mind, conjures up 2 Peter 2:22.  Souls that have found God’s truth decides to retreat back into the morass of the sinful world.  It’s not just that they find themselves distanced from God’s holiness; it’s that they have found joy there.  They like being foul.  And so they are unlikely to ever find holiness again.

I cannot afford to take joy in my misery.  I have to constantly remind myself of the task that is set in front of me, which is not going to wait for me.  I have responsibilities — parenting, husbanding, personal growing, relationship-building.  A barrier between myself and my work is a problem to be overcome, not an excuse to be exploited.  The day I give myself a pass is the day I quit on God’s plan for my life.

I’m not sick enough to embrace that future.

Similar Posts

Lobsters

ByHal Hammons

Lobsters are not immortal.  You may have heard otherwise, but it isn’t true.  They do have a remarkable way of reproducing cells that retards cell death indefinitely.  But turns out, getting old brings on a host of health difficulties, each of which may eventually become fatal.  They ward off the natural processes better than most species, granted, but death will inevitably get them in the end, as it will all of us.

Bigger

ByHal Hammons

The story goes that Yul Brynner, career flying after the success of The King and I and The Ten Commandments, was a bit annoyed at the upstart television actor named Steve McQueen that he had brought into the production of The Magnificent Seven.  McQueen had a habit of playing with his hat, wiping his brow, basically anything to get the audience’s eyes on him while he and Brynner were in a scene.

It went both ways, though.  Brynner, several inches shorter than McQueen, arranged for small piles of dirt to be nearby for him to stand on when acting with McQueen.  McQueen took delight in kicking the dirt piles over.  Ah, the famous camaraderie of thespians!

McQueen’s antics worked, it seems.  He became one of the biggest screen stars of the 1960s.  Brynner’s career, on the other hand, trended downward more and more.  My generation knows him as much as anything for those creepy lung cancer commercials he made just before he died.

Who is “bigger”?  Men have been fighting over that vague concept for centuries.  And women have their own version of the battle; they’re just not as likely to literally kill anyone in pursuit of the blue ribbon.  “We just tease her until she develops an eating disorder,” one female TV character once observed.

But life shouldn’t be a competition for Christians. Our reward is heavenly (Hebrews 11:16).  And heaven has no limit to its capacity.  “Whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans 10:13).  So if someone isn’t bumping us out of line for heaven, why should we worry if he insists on being “bigger” in this life?  That’s his problem.  I don’t have to make it my problem.

Weather

ByMark Watson

The forecast called for a 100 percent chance of weather, and as usual it was right on the money.  One day last week I drove through a steady display of what I have taken to calling “Florida rain,” a barrage of tiny droplets completely unlike anything we ever saw in Texas.  (Raindrops in Texas, on…

Unfunny

ByHal Hammons

Amy Schumer’s recently released comedy special on Netflix is, by all accounts, (and pardon the reference to her recent film, which I carefully avoided) a trainwreck.  Early comments and ratings give it one star out of five.  That’s pretty bad, even by Netflix original programming standards. 

Audience

ByHal Hammons

I don’t know Amy Petty, and I barely know her music.  (I’m not much of an indie guy.)  But I appreciate what she wrote in a blog recently about why she is not going to try out for The Voice or one of the other half-million competition programs out there these days.  She says she…