Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

“As surely as God lives, who has denied me justice,
    the Almighty, who has made my life bitter,
as long as I have life within me,
    the breath of God in my nostrils,
my lips will not say anything wicked,
    and my tongue will not utter lies.

• Job 27:2-4

What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.

• James 4:1-3

The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me.

• Mark 14:7

Boilerplate

I’m Harold Dykstra.  I’m retired, but I go to food bank distributions all over Tracy and talk to people that need someone who will listen to their story.  My time is well spent.  A police lieutenant suggested that I write down the conversations that I had with an angel.  I did not know she was an angel at the time.  The angel, for a little over a year, indwelled a life-sized posable action figure my children bought me, so that I would not be perceived as travelling alone.  And in a way, she was training me for what I do while talking to the needy.  She probed my heart to find out what I believed and how I express love for others.  She changed my life.  Since she was a doll that had come to life, we came up with the term ‘other living.’  She was not a human, an animal, or even a plant, but she was definitely living, and very vibrant.  Oh, excuse me, angels have no gender, but the angel indwelled a doll named Bountiful Babs.  After seeing the angel in that form for over a year, I cannot see her in my mind in any other form.

This Week’s Question

In the last episode, Babs made a sales call when a reaction to some medication knocked me out.

But now, I was fine, and we were in west Texas.  She started bursting out in song, old westerns.

I asked, “Babs, where did you learn these songs?”

Babs was driving since she felt that while taking the potent antibiotics, I might fall asleep at any moment.  She looked straight ahead, not trusting her ability to look around and stay on the road.

She answered, “Remember a couple of weeks ago when you stayed at one hotel as a central point and went to different customers each day.  Well, I did a lot of walking, but Thursday of that week was a little rainy, so I stayed in the room.  The cleaning lady was shocked to see me.  She said that she thought I would be out telling people about Jesus.  She never pictured me as a couch potato.  I had to ask her what couch potato meant.  Then I said, ‘Don’t you know that Thursdays are designated as being couch potato days?’  We laughed and when she finished her rooms, she came back and sat on the bed next to me and we went ‘pieu, pieu,’ shooting all the bad guys in the movie.”

I scratched my head, “Babs, I think that a pistol makes a larger sound than simply ‘pieu’.”

“You have not heard me fire my six-shooter, Harold.  We are headed toward El Paso.  We will not be going to Rose’s Cantina.  You will not be meeting the beautiful Felina.  Do not worry.  I have been practicing.  I am getting pretty good with my six-shooter, and I can outdraw any of those boys in the movies.” Babs retorted.

I was thinking that she was referring to the slow-motion gunfight scene.

Then Babs asked, “Why are all those movies really old?”

I moaned, “The world is all messed up today.  They think we can have civilized discourse that eliminated the need for deadly weapons.  So, one set of activists wanted no more westerns that portray guns solving the conflict.  Then you had another set of activists that thought the animals were harmed during the stunts in the movies and thus, stunts involving animals had to be eliminated, which made the battle scenes or the scenes where the posse chases the bad guys look kind of stupid.  And then other activists simply hated the male-dominated roles of sheriff and bad guy.  I could go on, but the use of weapons to solve things was the big one.”

Babs asked, “Has the world really gotten so far advanced and ‘evolved’ that they never use violence to solve a problem?  I see it all the time.”

“You are right, Babs.” I answered.  “What is the most important part of Job’s claim of always responding properly at the beginning of Job 27?  In Job 27:3, Job talks about God being in his nostrils.  Job does not have the power.  God within him gives Job the power to be rational and loving in such times.  But hundreds of years after Job was written, James 4 tells us that we do the wrong thing when we have fights and quarrels.  If we do not have, we kill to get it.  That is the truth, or maybe a combination of those two.  Jesus said we will always have the poor.  And among those poor, we will always have someone willing to kill to get what he does not have … or she.  We are still in that mode, unless we have God in our nostrils, although these days they talk about God in our hearts.”

Babs scrunched her nose, “But, Harold, if you are wrong, and we stumble upon some bad characters in the west Texas town of El Paso, never fear.  Babs will protect you.”

I muttered, “I feel safer already just knowing that, Babs.”

She simply giggled.

Credits

All these conversations remind me of my conversations with my wife.  We would talk about anything and everything.  And most of the time, it sounded like a discussion in a Sunday school class.

My wife would often start singing western songs, out of the blue.  The one she sang more than the rest put together was El Paso, by Marty Robbins.  And yes, she knew the long version, word for word.  Why not?  She lived in El Paso, Texas from first grade through the eleventh grade.  She even claimed to have been to Rose’s Cantina a number of times, but then again, was it the same one from the song?

When we moved to Germany in the late 1970s, some of the Germans would learn that my wife was from El Paso, Texas. They would get excited, asking her how many gunfights she had witnessed, as if the Old West was like it was depicted in the movies. It was hard convincing them that most of that was done in Hollywood. The Old West was a theme in many German camping sites in those days, with the option of spending your weekend in a tepee.

And Harold did not think he was that terribly safe with Babs as his hired gunslinger, but in less than a year, he would learn she had always been his guardian angel.  Protecting him was her job.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.