August 10, 2009 It's All in the Way You Look at Things

Philip Parker is a wonderfully whimsical poet whose delightful performances for children are just as enjoyable for the adults who take them. His poem “An Utterly Ugly Day” goes like this (I've indicated his pronunciation):

What an utterly ‘ug-a-ly’ day!
Mr. Sun … will you please go away?
I’m a frog , and I’m mad On my hot lily pad ,
‘Cause you’re burning my toes with your rays !

What an utterly ‘ug-al-y’ day!
Mr. Sun … come back some other day!
I like wetness and soggy –You’re toasting my body
And burning my toes with your rays !

What an utterly ‘ug-al-y’ day!
Wait a minute; I’m covered in shade …
From that dark cloud above – Hey! It’s raining a flood!
What a wet… clammy…icky…sticky…slippy…drippy…slimy…sloppy… soggy… boggy…
beautiful day!

To you or me, a rainy day may not hold the same appeal (unless we’ve got an empty house and a good book to enjoy) but to a frog, it’s the best! In the same way, because we are all different and have different needs and desires, what’s a blessing to you may or may not be a blessing to me. We have to allow room for such differences without judging issues that, in the eternal scope of things, don’t amount to the proverbial hill of beans.

We get into trouble—and Christians are especially prone to this, I’m afraid—when we hear the Lord guiding us into one direction and take it one step…one giant leap…further. If God wants me to do this, or stop doing that, he must want everyone to, right? Not necessarily.

Some things are absolutes. Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, the only begotten son of the Father who lived a sinless life, offered himself as the ultimate sacrifice for the sin (and sins) of humankind once and for all so that we might have an open door back to fellowship with God, rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, and will return again for his Bride, the Church. What he looked like, how he might dress in the 21st century, and whether or not he prefers hymns or choruses…these are peripheral things unworthy of argument or even much discussion, unless it’s very late at night and you’re sitting around with roommates munching on cold pizza.

Just before a storm comes, there’s often a wonderful feel of the air, in the smell of it. Something cool and delicious passes through, signaling change. Whether you welcome the change or not is a matter of your own preferences, but you can’t argue with the fact that something is about to happen. You can’t stop it, either.

Down through history, learned scholars who should have known better have argued about how many angels will fit on the head of a pin and other nonsense. Sacrificing truth for detail, such people still get so hung up, like Philip’s grumbling frog, on the temperature, that they are prone to miss the change in the weather. Sometimes they find a hole in the ground to hide in from the hot climate they want to escape, and end up missing the coolness of the rain that has come altogether.

We interpret the weather in different ways, but we can’t stop it. We have a choice to make when the wind turns—do we welcome it? Are we prepared for it? Can we see its beauty even if we’d rather have a cloudless afternoon? Some things never change—Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever, the Bible tells us in Hebrews 13—but very much in the world, in the Church, in our own lives will be in a constant state of flux. Our heart will determine our response.

ellenofgillette1@aol.com

For more poems by Philip Parker, contact him at philipparker@atmc.net.