Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogant schemes. All such boasting is evil. If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.

• James 4:13-17

Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.

• Philippians 4:4-6

For I envied the arrogant
    when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
^…
Surely in vain I have kept my heart pure
    and have washed my hands in innocence.
^…
When I tried to understand all this,
    it troubled me deeply
till I entered the sanctuary of God;
    then I understood their final destiny.

• Psalm 73:3, 13, 16, 17

If anyone builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, their work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each person’s work. If what has been built survives, the builder will receive a reward. If it is burned up, the builder will suffer loss but yet will be saved—even though only as one escaping through the flames.

• 1 Corinthians 3:12-15

“But there is nothing normal about today.  Just think about everything that must function properly just for you to survive.  For example, your kidneys.  The only people who really think about their kidneys are people whose kidneys don’t work correctly. The majority of us take for granted our kidneys, liver, lungs, and other internal organs that we’re dependent upon to continue living.
What about driving down the road at sixty-five miles per hour, only a few feet away from cars going the opposite direction at the same speed? Someone would only have to jerk his or her arm and you would be dead. I don’t think that’s morbid; I think it’s reality.
“It’s crazy that we think today is just a normal day to do whatever we want with. …
“When you think about it, that’s a little disconcerting. But even after reading those verses, do you really believe you could vanish at any minute? That perhaps today you will die? Or do you instead feel some­ how invincible?
“…
“Worry implies that we don’t quite trust that God is big enough, powerful enough, or loving enough to take care of what’s happening in our lives.
Stresssays that the things we are involved in are important enough to merit our impatience, our lack of grace toward others, or our tight grip of control.
“Basically, these two behaviors communicate that it’s okay to sin and not trust God because the stuff in my life is somehow exceptional. Both worry and stress reek of arrogance. They declare our tendency to forget that we’ve been forgiven, that our lives here are brief, that we are headed to a place where we won’t be lonely, afraid, or hurt ever again, and that in the context of God’s strength, our problems are small, indeed.
“…
“The point of your life is to point to Him.  Whatever you are doing, God wants to be glorified, because this whole thing is His.  It is His movie, His world, His gift.”

• Francis Chan, crazy love

When I worked on the NASA project in northeast Mississippi, we had a strange collection of people.  The local sheriff called all of us “California Noggin’ Heads” and set up a speed trap in the site’s parking lot so that he had just cause to fine us for not getting a local driver’s license and license plate for the vehicle.  The court threw out all charges due to the sheriff being prejudiced and the judge claimed entrapment due to the deputies writing out the tickets in the NASA parking lot, after the sheriff used the radar on our approach to the entrance.

Okay, my point is that I was a Mississippi native, but I had moved from South Carolina and my wife and children were still there until the end of the school semester.  There were more people like me, but the majority were “California Noggin’ Heads” and a third were from Huntsville, AL, home of Redstone Arsenal where they test rockets upside down.  Really, they put the pointed end down and fire the rocket to prove that their thrust calculations were accurate and that the burn was even, etc.  I never got to sit on the hill and watch that.

One of my workmates was from Huntsville and he was approaching his fiftieth birthday.  No one in his family for at least three or four generations had ever made it: older siblings, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, great uncles, etc.  For months, he brought up how he was going to die soon.  Two people, his Dad and an uncle, died within a week of their fiftieth birthday, his uncle the night before his birthday.

The boss was tired of the topic, and he let the forty-nine year old take a day off and be with his family back in Huntsville for the fateful day.  The next morning, we arrived and he was at his desk working.  We each greeted him with something like, “Welcome back from vacation, Mr. Fifty-year-old!”

His reply to each of us was, “Oh, shut up!”

He had the last laugh.  He knew how politics worked, and when Bill Clinton was elected president, he got a lesser paying job back in Huntsville.  He had saved enough (to give to his kids) to pay off the RV he was staying in during the week.  He moved back to Huntsville and used his “work RV” as a vacation RV.  The rest of us were laid off about a year later.  But he knew what was coming.

But it is odd that he could not see the fact that he might outlive his previous relatives.  Have you ever been so arrogant that you knew you would die by a certain date?

As Rev. Chan points out, most of us have the feeling of invincibility, the opposite of my old friend.  We give little thought to dying.  It hit my heart strings when he used the example of kidney failure waking us up to “worry” about the kidneys.  But we did not know, until it was too late, that kidney dialysis stiffens the heart, and specifically stiffens any animal tissue of the heart.  My wife had an aortic valve made of bovine tissue.  I would joke that when you listened to her heart, it did not go “tick-tick.”  It went “moo.”  Not a good joke when the heart got too tired of pumping past a stiff valve that refused to open.

Two people teased me and humbled me before them because they were my elders.  My brother passed away 13 years ago plus a few months.  I have already lived three years longer than he did.  My wife tried to use the fact that she was my elder to win every argument we ever had.  Within another month from when this comes out, I will have lived longer than she did, but as James says above – if the Lord is willing.  I have a tightness in my chest thinking about that, kind of like my friend on the NASA project.

My wife was the most giving person I ever knew.  She served everyone.  She felt that she had to serve family, friends, and then anyone else that came by at the moment.  Yet, to use Rev. Chan’s definition of worry, she worried so much that when it came to trusting God, she must have been excessively arrogant.  It was one of those sins that she recognized as a sin, but she struggled to let go and let God handle it.

My wife and I ended many arguments, any argument dealing with finances, with an argument about worrying over finances.  I might worry about my health as much as my wife did, but I never worried about finances over the last 20 plus years of her life, when my job was at its most uncertain.  She would yell that I do not take it seriously that I could lose my job, and we would be ruined.  And my reply was that I do take it seriously that God is in control.  And now, I wish I could just have that argument with her one more time, but she has been gone for more than a year and a half.

The title of this chapter in the book was “You might not finish this chapter.”  When you found out that he was meaning that you might die, I am sure many people got worried and stressed.

In the James Gregory comedy routine about how tornadoes always hit trailer parks, he talks about how the man that the reporter is interviewing (supposedly the dumbest person that the reporter could find) always says, “It sounded like a freight train coming.”  Then the comedian, in not so soft of language, says, “You idiot!  You live ten miles from the nearest railroad tracks.  If that was me, and I heard the train turn and start coming up the driveway, I would have been long gone by then!”  I cleaned it up a bit.  The comedian’s conclusion was that if you have a moderately nice little town that you like living in and you want to protect it from tornadoes, build a fake trailer park a few miles out of town.

My point in bringing it up is that when you hear a freight train and you are too far away to normally hear a freight train, you do something about it.  If you have symptoms of a heart condition, check it out.  But when it comes to going through life from one day to the next, try to not worry or stress.

God has us in the palm of His hand.

Lord, fill me with Your love.  Fill me with Your awesomeness so that I will never worry or get stressed.  Life is tough, but even in the toughest times, You are tougher.  And You love us.  Thank You for loving me.  In Your name I pray.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.