Spreading posterior

Funerals often serve as a reunion of sorts, bringing an assortment of relatives and friends that have not seen each other for years together. I was reminiscing with one of my cousins and she started patting me on my belly and then she called her sister over to where we were standing and said, “See I told you, he’s getting a gut on him. You said he still looked tall and thin, but look”, and then she pointed to my belly, (which by now I was sucking in). I looked at her and smiled. It was all I could do to keep from telling her that she should look in the mirror at her posterior, (provided she could see it all), I mean after all, it has widened substantially since last seeing her, but I held my tongue.

Just then another relative came up and asked me if I was growing my hair out long to be a hippie again and then he laughed. I stammered that I was due to get a haircut when all of this happened and just didn’t get a chance to cut it before getting out of town. I bit my tongue in order not to tell him that he shouldn’t be talking, because his beard looked like it was infested with the mange on the underbelly of a coyote.

Just then a cousin who is older than me told me, “You sure are looking old”. I winced and smiled and nearly choked as I held back an appropriate description of his deteriorated condition being reminiscent of something reptilian that I had seen at the Chicago Museum of Natural History.

The coup de grace came when several of us were sitting at a table discussing our family’s genealogy. A couple of family members have been tracing our heritage and like most families we had a couple of bad apples. My eldest cousin was telling me about one of them who had been shot dead in a gunfight and his brothers, (my great uncles), took revenge by tracking his killer down in Detroit and gunning him down. My cousin looked at me and smiled and said, “See Bob you just thought you were the only bad apple in the family, there were others”.

Hmmm

OK No more Mr. Nice Guy, in a minute I told my oldest son that he had something green on his ear. He started rubbing his ear and asking, “Did I get it?” I looked at him with a sick look and said “No, it’s right on the top of your ear”. He kept rubbing it until the entire top of his ear was red and then he went to the bathroom and tried to see it. As we filed into the church for the funeral he was still rubbing his ear trying to remove the nonexistent green off his ear.

When I flew home last night my ticket was upgraded to first class due to my Medallion status, but my wife had to ride way in the back of the plane in coach. I offered her my ticket, but she refused, so not wanting a perfectly good first class ticket to go to waste, I rode up in front in first class by myself. When I got off the plane I told her the warmed almonds, and vanilla bean ice cream and chocolate hot fudge topping were really good and I asked her if she had been served ice cream way back in coach. She glared at me and said they had not even been given a coke on the short flight.

Of course I had lied to her, we didn’t get warmed almonds or ice cream topped with hot fudge topping, but by now I was in full retribution mode. It lingered through today as I now relate these incidents to thousands of people who are now aware about the wide posterior of one cousin, and the mangy beard of another relative, etc

And the Bible says that we should leave vengeance to the Lord

Not long before I left for the airport one cousin looked at me and said, “I’ve heard all that stuff about you changing your life, but you’re not fooling me even a little; I can tell that you’re still just as full of meanness as always. I remember when we were all little kids and you used to get us in trouble by convincing us to smoke cigarettes under the front porch at “Mama’s” house and you haven’t changed one little bit.

Arghhh You know she’s right. It is impossible to be good no matter how hard we try and that is why I love Jesus. His precious blood covers all of my sins and imperfections and because of what HE did I will be able to enter into heaven. Without Him, I’d bust hell wide open and believe it or not so would you.

Colossians 1:13
For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves