Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Saying 3
Do not make friends with a hot-tempered person,
    do not associate with one easily angered,
or you may learn their ways
    and get yourself ensnared.
Saying 4
Do not be one who shakes hands in pledge
    or puts up security for debts;
if you lack the means to pay,
    your very bed will be snatched from under you.
Saying 5
Do not move an ancient boundary stone
    set up by your ancestors.
Saying 6
Do you see someone skilled in their work?
    They will serve before kings;
    they will not serve before officials of low rank.

• Proverbs 22:24-29

Proverbs 22:24-25: ”We’ve all been tempted to do it, even on a small scale. We want to get back at someone for something they’ve done to us with a snide remark or by criticizing them in front of others. If we haven’t done it, at least we’ve thought about doing it. In either case, it only makes the original issue worse. Once anger, frustration, deceit, or cunning ways get a foothold in any situation in our lives, the devil begins to have a field day. There is no telling when we will be able to turn things around, restore the relationship-if ever-or regain our reputation.
Most coaches frequently talk to players about their behavior both on and off the field. No matter what happens to you, don’t compound the problem by trying to get back at whoever did something to you. Did you get that? So often it’s not the initial issue or incident that gets you into trouble-it’s what happens next. How often have you seen the player who retaliates for a cheap shot get the penalty flag thrown on him instead of on the original offender? …
When you find yourself in a volatile situation, don’t make things worse by letting anger get the better of you. Be wiser than hot-tempered people with short fuses. If you stay calm instead of reacting angrily, it will be easier to control yourself in whatever situation you find yourself. And it may have a lasting effect on someone else.”

• Tony Dungy, Uncommon Life – Daily Challenge (excerpt from devotion for 5 November)

The Message

We have four more sayings to finish this chapter, 24 more sayings to go.  We started with the first two sayings last week.

Saying 3 speaks of staying away from people with a quick temper.  It is a habit that is easily obtained and a habit of which is extremely difficult to rid yourself.  My father’s father was a hot head, oddly shouting Scripture to punctuate why he was angry.  He taught my Dad well, but my Dad had less of the instant recall of thousands of Bible references.  He might quote the verse, but in anger, he would have no idea what book, much less chapter and verse.  And since that was my only parental role model for the punishment phase of unspoken rules that my mother had (always not showing any reaction to my offense – just writing it down and giving the charge to my Dad to deal with – she lived by “wait until your Dad gets home,” without ever saying it, which left me blindsided each time).  So, I learned that I should intuitively know rules that had never been spoken and rage was the initial response, although Dad often never had a clue why he punished me, which might have been a source of the anger.  Why was my Dad dealing with this after he had been gone for three months on a business trip to Mexico City?  That might make me angry too.

But in punishing the boys, I would explain to them the offense, and then leave the room.  This allowed them to think about what they did wrong, but me leaving the room gave me a chance to calm down and not punish in anger.  Where I lost it was in driving down the road.  Always the same son whined that his brother was pestering him.  I just wanted peace and quiet while I negotiated heavy traffic on the road.  If the one son was pestering, the other son had done something to warrant the pestering.  This takes into account Tony Dungy’s example in his quote.  I saw a plaque in a store window a few years ago.  It read: Insanity is genetic.  You get it from your children.  I did not buy it, but I should have.

Saying four speaks of vows, but mostly providing financial security.  I have heard people say that no one ever loans a child money.  Their point is that children rarely, if ever, pay back the loan.  Thus, you might not have known it at the time, but you gave the child the money.  I have heard also that a verbal contract is not worth the paper that it is not written on.  In some governmental boundaries (city, county, state, township, parrish, country, etc.) there may be laws that no matter how “broke” you become certain things cannot be garnished to pay for that bad debt.  In those cases, probably the roof over your head or the bed underneath you might be protected.  Everything else is fair game.  Do you know the person that well?  Or is the person so well known that you have a tendency of giving grace and mercy rather than “Hey!  I’m paying the bank interest on the loan I got to help you out and I am now going broke because you don’t pay the loan back.”  I have seen the latter more often than the former.

I have been renting the house I live in for the past, umm, nearly thirty years.  I had a neighbor, now deceased, who claimed the property belonged to the person who mowed it.  I mowed up next to his house from that day on, not wanting him to start claiming the use of my landlady’s property for whatever immoral purpose he had in mind.  But one day when I was not looking, he asked the neighbor on the other side of me to cut a tree down in his backyard.  Only problem, it was in my backyard.  I called the landlady, and she said that she wasn’t very fond of that tree anyway.

And the strange thing was that there was a half-inch diameter rebar driven in the ground to mark the property line.  As I mentioned, the neighbor passed away and the new owner flipped the house.  The present owner placed a stone on top of the iron rod.  There is no problem with knowing where the property line is, but when the lawncare people who do my lawn or the neighbor’s son mows his lawn, they either mow to the edge of the neighbor’s house or the edge of my gravel driveway.  And I never complain.

I think Saying Six is more of a wise saying than a guarantee.  There are skilled writers who have never been published.  There are skilled musicians that have never performed outside the church.  Note: Our church used to have a musical director who was asked to perform at Carnegie Hall (the one at the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, not the one in New York City).  Hey, it was still an honor.

Some of the lack of recognition is the bureaucracy.  You cannot get published without an agent.  Agents do not even answer the phone unless you have been published.  I am sure other industries have similar Catch-22 situations.

And skill is in the eye of the beholder.  I have been left scratching my head, not thinking what the artist was thinking, but what was the critic who said it was wonderful thinking?

And now let us sing.

The following song is Even if… .  This is sung by MercyMe.

Closing Prayer

Dear Lord,
We need Your wisdom.  Help us to value wisdom.  Help us realize that only You can truly have righteous anger.  We can only have anger in our feeling of injustice that is never righted, while You make all things right in the end.  Some of our anger might be that a loan was not repaid, but we gave the money with no guarantee that the loan would ever be paid.  Should our anger be redirected toward the one we see in the mirror?  Our anger may be that a neighbor moved the stone that marks our property boundaries, but again we look in the mirror to see the one who relied on a stone.  And when we look in the mirror and wonder why our skill and talent has not been duly recognized, we need to again go to the mirror.  Are we that good to warrant recognition?  Or is it that we failed in submitting our skilled work to enough people.  The person who gains instant success ignores the countless rejection notices and keeps going.  Bill Gaither said that he and Gloria gained instant success with He Touched Me, but they had written 50-60 songs before that point that were not noticed at all until the first hit caused people to relook at the other songs.  We must look in the mirror to see a sinful person who was saved by grace.  They were not saved because they were perfect.  They were saved because they needed saving and God loved them that much.
In thy Name we pray.
Amen

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.