Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

We were not looking for praise from people, not from you or anyone else, even though as apostles of Christ we could have asserted our authority. Instead, we were like young children among you.
Just as a nursing mother cares for her children, so we cared for you. Because we loved you so much, we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well. Surely you remember, brothers and sisters, our toil and hardship; we worked night and day in order not to be a burden to anyone while we preached the gospel of God to you. You are witnesses, and so is God, of how holy, righteous and blameless we were among you who believed. For you know that we dealt with each of you as a father deals with his own children, encouraging, comforting and urging you to live lives worthy of God, who calls you into his kingdom and glory.

• 1 Thessalonians 2:6-12

“When you see ‘the abomination that causes desolation’ standing where it does not belong—let the reader understand—then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. Let no one on the housetop go down or enter the house to take anything out. Let no one in the field go back to get their cloak. How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers!

• Mark 13:14-17

Here is another of those observation reports that leaves me baffled, although I am the one that wrote it.

Shopping center parking lots have two types of reserved parking places that are utterly ridiculous:  Reserved for Veterans and Reserved for Pregnant and New Mothers.

Is anyone going to challenge an old guy who parks in a Veteran’s only parking space?  He might wear a MARINE baseball cap, but I was in the Army, and I could buy a Marine baseball cap without showing my DD-214 (discharge papers for you non-USA-veterans).  I have written recently that I have carried my paperwork and my wife’s paperwork to get a free meal here or there, but no one ever challenges me, probably because if they looked at a yellowing piece of paper with DD-214 at the top or bottom, they would not have a clue what they were looking at.  And the form changed in the roughly eight years from when my wife got out until I got out, one form number on the top and the other form number (the same number, same form) on the bottom.

Now if a teenager, with their driver’s license still warm from having just received it, parked in a Veteran Reserved spot, someone, if brave enough to wrestle with a child with raging hormones, might challenge the kid.

But what brought this on is that my wife grocery shopped the other day, and I sat in the car, people watching.  I was in the last handicapped spot.  Next to me and diagonally across from me were PREGNANT and NEW MOTHER parking spaces.  Back years ago, the first time I saw one of those, a guy parked in one.  He was not an ugly woman unless ugly women can have full beards, a hairy chest and washboard abs.  No, I did not challenge whether he was a new or pregnant mother.

But on this occasion, both parking places had cars parked there.  My wife went in the store to buy 5-6 items, so I knew I had an hour or so to watch what happened.

The lady next to me arrived with her groceries first.  Her child was about 1-2 years old.  The little girl had to sit in a protective car seat, but the child was well-behaved and self-sufficient.

The lady on the next traffic aisle came out next.  She had an infant, probably less than six-months old in a child carrier.  She also had a two-year-old and a four-year-old.  The baby was out of the shopping cart and snap, snap into the protective car seat.  The other two children were totally self-sufficient.  They climbed into the car with no assistance and buckled themselves in.

In the second lady’s parking place, a guy pulled in.  His wife, who was overweight (no judgment, but it ties in), sat next to the guy.  Was she pregnant?  I have no idea.  She never got out of the pickup truck.  It was an extended cab, and after they sat there for 2-3 minutes, a boy who was easily five years old jumped from the back seat into the front, between his parents.  The boy and his father went into the store to get a dozen items.  Note: He was a guy, so it took him ten minutes and he was back unloading the stuff into the back of the truck.

So, with the first lady, how old does your only child have to be before you are no longer a “new mother?”

Now, let’s take a different approach to the new mother definition.  When you have three children and they are all well-behaved, are you still a “new mother” when your third one is an infant?  This woman had been a mother for years.

And since the third mother never left the car, and it is horribly dangerous ground to ask a fat woman how far along you are…  Not going to go there!!!!  There was no way of knowing whether she was pregnant or not.  And when the child helped the father unload the shopping cart, the mother was not laden down with the burden of a child in tow.

Out of all these observations, the one that I had years ago was the only clear violation, but that guy had eyebrows that had more muscle than I have in my entire body.  I wasn’t going to confront him.

It really comes down to the shopping center doing some virtue signaling.  “See!  We care!  It’s the 80-year-old man in the New Mother parking space that messed the whole thing up!!”  And really, it is only one more temptation for the lazy unrepentant jerk who will park in either of those spaces, and even the POLICE ONLY parking space.  They have no conscience.  They do not care.  And they probably have a loaded shotgun under the seat.

Please!! Come on!!!  The reason the handicapped person parks a block away in the other store’s extension parking, where no one parks, is because half of the handicapped parking spaces are taken up by teenagers that are “borrowing” their dead uncle’s handicap thingie that they hang from the rearview mirror.  Most people call it a “tag”, but a “tag” is what you bolt to the back bumper.

Other than the brownie points that the shopping center guy gets for the virtue signaling, the cost for those other parking spaces are a waste of the signpost and the sign.  Except for the Police space.  I have never seen anyone brave enough to park in one of those, not even a police (person).

And my heart really goes out to those pregnant and new (nursing) mothers.  Even Jesus, Himself, singled them out that times will be hard for them during the End Times.

Do I have a point today?  Maybe not.  We are all sinners.  I sin, but then I have passed on the Veterans parking space when I did not have my paperwork with me.  Note: Now that my latest driver’s license, and that of my wife, has VETERAN printed on the license, that spot, if there is one and it’s available is MINE!!!!

And I think we are in the End Times when nine out of ten drivers on the road care of nothing but themselves and they have no conscience when it comes to parking places near the entrance.  I have not found those words in any of the End Times prophecies, but it must be a misprint.

And yes, this may have been spawned by a legitimate question, but I hope everyone knows it was meant as a humorous rant – all observations true, with no exaggerations, except maybe the bodybuilding “pregnant” male mother’s eyebrow muscles, but then not by much.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.