December 27, 2018 – Click here to listen
I was sitting in my deer hunting stand one day bored out of mind. It was a hot day and the deer just weren’t moving; in fact, neither was anything else, save a few hundred thousand mosquitoes. I hadn’t so much as seen a squirrel, or even a bird much less a whitetail deer. It is times like these when my mind turns to mischief. I happened to think of a friend of mine that I knew would be in some very important meeting whereby he would be attempting to solve the problems of the world. I decided to send him a text, (which I knew he would not be able to resist reading).
I wrote, “Did you hear what just happened on Guam?”
I chuckled as I envisioned him Googling Guam and scouring his news feeds looking for information on it.
Then in a few minutes I sent him another text that read, “That was pretty bad huh?
Some time elapsed and then right on schedule I received a text from him that read, “So what happened on Guam?”
I replied, “I dunno!”
I didn’t hear back from him until a day or two later and he told me that he did exactly as I predicted and tried to Google it while sitting in his very important meeting; (he held his iPhone under the table, so no one could see that he was not paying attention at his own meeting).
He couldn’t find anything about Guam, so what did he do? He interrupted his crucial meeting and with a serious look on his face and asked his high-powered attendees if anyone knew what just happened on Guam.
That set off a flurry of activity as they all fired up their personal cell phones, laptops, iPads and other devices to Google and scour the search engines flooding the room and airwaves with microwave blasts as they looked for what just happened on Guam, but they all came up empty.
The next day I saw him and when he asked about it again, I belly laughed so hard tears streamed down my cheeks as I told him it was just a prank. All the while he looked at me with a mystified expression on his face that anyone’s mind could be so devious and demented. What kind of person could devise such a nasty way to torment him like that for no logical reason? The only thing he could conclude was that I did it for the sheer joy of knowing that I manipulated him into doing something dumb. He concluded that there was no logical explanation that a sane person could find other than I did it out of meanness and he said so.
As I wiped away tears from my eyes, I told him not to take it so hard it was all in good fun.
So why would I do such a thing?
Again, I dunno . . . (bad seed maybe?) I think maybe because I was bored silly, and an idle mind sometimes takes us to strange places.
It’s probably a good thing that I actually don’t have much idle time. So, these days I commit myself to staying busy somehow. While Christmas is a time to celebrate the birth of Christ and catalogue fond memories with families, it is also an ideal time to review the previous year and formulate goals for next year. I urge you to find a quiet place sometime over the holidays where you can be alone and do just that and come up with your own list of significant projects that can be accomplished for the Lord.
Take a page out of my book and don’t let idleness consume you. Too much food, too much drink, too much football, and of course idle time could just result in nothing being accomplished aside from the mischievous.
Day before yesterday my next-door neighbor came to the very brink of death and could have just as easily crossed over to the other side. It came on suddenly, without warning and along with the death of my good friend several days ago reminded me of why we should make the most of every day. Our days are surely numbered, and we just never know when that number will be called.
If goal setting is not your bag, then consider that today is a good time to do something
nice for those less fortunate and the perfect time to thank God for what He has given us. Selah . . .
1 Thess. 5:14
And we urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all.