Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’
“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’
“He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’
“Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

• Matthew 25:31-46

I was thinking about this being another Saturday afternoon post.  I thought of posts, as in fence posts.  Then, I remembered making a lot of fence posts one summer.  Probably the only summer, even counting my military years, where I was in really good shape.

I know.  That train of thought was kind of weird.  But I cannot remember what year it was, the year I turned sixteen or the year I turned seventeen.

Anyway, my Dad asked me one day whether I wanted to pretend to be Abraham Lincoln for a while.  I really did not have a choice.  When he assigned me a task while he was off building a poultry processing plant somewhere in the Americas (his territory), I would have my mother keeping an eye out from a distance to insist that I made progress.

But Dad speaking of Abraham Lincoln who once split rails made the task a little bit of fun.  Doing something in an old-fashioned way added to the fun.  He showed me where he had dropped an old chestnut tree, killed in a blight decades ago.  It was hollow, but the diameter of the tree might have been five feet at the base.  He showed me how to read the cracks in the tree.  He had already cut the tree into fence post lengths with a chainsaw.  I was to hammer a metal wedge into a crack and hammer it in with a three-pound sledgehammer.  Do that for several hours each day for an entire summer, and you’ll get muscle tone.

This was back in the day when latchkey kids were the norm.  I was at home, alone, about a half mile behind the house, hammering a wedge into a chestnut tree until it submitted to my will.  I would hammer the wedge until the head was flush with the chainsaw cut.  A second wedge a few feet down the trunk of the tree (or up, since I worked from the base to the top), but that second wedge was rarely needed as once the fence post that I had made would easily split along the grain of the wood.

My Dad would come home every other week and count the number of fence posts I had made until he said that he had enough.  He rented a fence post driving tool for the tractor that he borrowed from next door.

It was only then that I learned what the posts were for.  Sure, I thought fence posts were meant to be used for a fence, but where?

My folks property line went from the highway to a flood control lake built by the Corps of Engineers.  My uncle owned the land beyond, but he had never improved that land.  Our neighbor on the other side of this strip of property was a wonderful neighbor, but he owned goats.  There was no fence between his backyard and our property.  And it might have been near a mile from the road to the lake.  My Dad was tired of the goats eating the pears from a nice pear tree in that part of our property.

The fence post driver saved the laborious task of digging a hole for each post, packing the dirt around the post, and waiting for the ground to settle before we stretched the fence.  We could stretch the fence wire as soon as the post was driven into the ground.  Some of my posts were rejected.  They might make great posts, but they might not survive the hydraulic hammer that would hammer the posts into the Mississippi red clay.  It took hardly any time for us to stretch the fence and keep the goats out.

I suppose that the fence is still there, but I haven’t seen a goat next door for several decades.

The parable that Jesus tells is about how we are all mixed together here on earth.  There are those who love the Lord, and some that hate Him, and some that could care less one way or the other.  But God knows who is who.  The sheep will be gathered up into the loving arms of the shepherd and the goats will be left out.  As an old song says.  The sheep go to heaven and the goats go to hell.

My Dad was a hard man to get to know, but during my teen years, I built an extension on the house, more room for the den, a two-car garage, and a laundry room, all for the house that my sister lives in today.  I built a new leeching field for the septic tank.  I broke an entire patio of four to six-inch thick concrete pieces, all made with irregular shapes (except for the lid of the septic tank which I knew not to touch).  With each piece the size of a softball or grapefruit when finished, I carted the concrete to a place that was eroding to stabilize the hillside.  I broke the concrete with the same sledgehammer that I used for the fence posts.  You hit it in the same spot enough times and it will crack.

St. Francis of Assisi has been attributed as saying, “Preach the Gospel at all times.  Use words if necessary.”  But scholars of today cannot find anything that he ever said that was close to that.  Even his disciples, those who learned directly from him never hinted he said something like that.  We need to proclaim the Gospel, and St. Francis wanted us to work diligently so that what we said was correct, meaning that before we spoke, we had to do our homework.  That he said a lot about.

My Dad never talked much.  He did his talking by doing, and I learned volumes from him.

And I loved the pear preserves we would make, just from the pears of one tree.  Now that the goats didn’t eat the pears.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.