God’s True Love For Everyone
God loves each one of us as if there were only one of us.
“I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with loving-kindness.” Jeremiah 31:3
“One of these days! Bang, Zoom! Right to the moon!”
Yes. That’s a quote I said to my boys the other day. And yes. They gave me weird looks.
“What in the world are you talking about now, Dad?” they said with heavy sighs. By now they know that if I say something they have no clue what I’m talking about it’s going to start a “Remember When” conversation. So now they audibly groan and look for chores to do to get away from it.
“You’ve never heard of ‘The Honeymooners’?!” I exclaimed. “Oh boys, how I have failed you.” I lamented. So then I started to explain what the quote was about which got pretty embarrassing pretty fast so I decided to expand the subject. I asked them if they have ever watched a black and white TV show.
“Well, once in a class they made us watch part of some vampire movie,” one of the boys said.
Excitedly, I perked up and said, “You mean the movie ‘Nosferatu’! Oh I remember when I first saw that as a little boy I was so scared! You know the part when we first see the vampire guy with the weird ears and then . . .”
At which point he said, “I thought it was boring. And it didn’t have any words.”
“You mean it was a ‘silent’ film,” I started to explain. “Back then there wasn’t sound with the pictures and movie theaters used to hire piano players to play exciting musical scores and . . .”
“That just sounds boring, Dad,” another piped up.
“Oh it was anything but boring!” I tried to explain. “Especially when Charlie Chaplain would do his penguin dance. Oh that was so funny I would laugh and laugh and . . .”
“Charlie who?”
I’d explain about the swashbuckling adventures of Errol Flynn or the antics of the Three Stooges or the dramas of Orson Wells or the suspense of Alfred Hitchcock but by this time I knew I was fighting a losing battle.
In today’s world every movie is 3D.
In today’s world there’s surround sound. In today’s world there’s CGI heroes.
In today’s world there’s flying men and big green monsters.
In today’s world the heroes are the villains and the villains sometimes turn out to be the heroes.
And in today’s world there may not be a hero or a villain at all. At which point I just gave a heavy sigh and one of my boys said, “Poor, Daddy. He’s getting old.” “You a riot,” I said. “A regular riot.”
To which they said, “Huh?”
“Oh boys, how I have failed you.” I lamented.
Let us pray.
Dear God. Sometimes we find ourselves as strangers in a strange land. We look at the world around us and see a place we don’t recognize and aren’t sure how we can fit in. But in this world we know one thing. That your love will surround and your grace will bless us. And that truly is all we’ll ever need. In Christ’s name we pray. Amen.
Pastor Troy is the pastor of Malvern First United Methodist Church. You can catch his daily video devotionals at their website: www.firstmethodistmalvern.org