Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

He said to me: “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life.

• Revelation 21:6

I was driving to church one day.  I pulled up to a four-way stop sign and I opened a bottle of water to take a sip.  There was no one at the intersection other than me, but I saw some cars approaching behind me.

I took the time to screw the cap back on the bottle before going through the intersection, not wanting to fiddle with something other than driving when the car was moving.  Always the safety man.

But then an old comedy routine, or one joke, really, from nearly forty years ago came to mind.

A stand-up comedian was on stage and there was a bar stool next to him.  On the bar stool was a glass of water and a plastic bottle of water.  After telling a few jokes, there was a pause where he reached over, unscrewed the cap on the bottle of water, took a sip, and then screwed the cap back on the bottle.

Then he came back to the microphone.  He said, “Have you ever noticed how water has changed?  I just took a sip of water from the bottle, and I replaced the cap.  Like, germs were going to get in the bottle.  Years ago, in the old days, we had glasses of water.”  He grabbed the glass of water, and he took a sip.  “No one ever questioned whether the water was safe, it was just water!  This glass has been sitting out here uncovered ever since I got out here.  The water tasted the same, but why do we screw the cap back on the bottle after a single sip?”  Just to check, he took another sip from the glass.  “Yeah!  Nothing changed.  But then…”  He goes through the routine with the bottle again, but as he is about to screw the cap back on… “Should I or shouldn’t I screw the cap back on?”  He gets laughter, but suggestions on both options from the audience.  “Naw!”  He grabs the bottle and screws the cap on.  “Hey, you never can tell about these things!”

Then I got to church, and I happened to be watching the pastor when the liturgist announced that we would be passing the peace.  He turned to a bottle of sanitizer behind him, and he washed his hands.  He was not afraid of picking up a germ from us.  He was concerned about passing on a germ to us as he walked through the sanctuary shaking hands.

We have become germophobes.  It started before the pandemic in 2020.  I used to talk about, how as a child, I would eat dirt.  Maybe unintentionally.  But we thought nothing of such things.  As a child, I knew what type of grass to chew on.  Some of the weeds were poisonous, but some just did not taste very good.

But I think we developed antibodies in the process.  I do not think these antiseptic children out there could survive in our world.  And I have a feeling that my grandfather, who spent his first sixty years as a farmer and only went to the doctor once, would write about how soft I was growing up.  My father’s father went to the doctor once, but what led to that time was that his tractor flipped over on top of him.  He was alone in a remote field.  He landed, with the tractor on top of him in the rows that he had just plowed.  That saved his life.  The soil was not hard packed due to just being turned over.  He quickly learned that his collar bone was broken, but he still had one arm that he could use.  He dug himself out, using the one good arm, from underneath the tractor and he walked to the house.  His wife, the local school marm, sent a message to someone who had a car, and my grandfather was taken into town to see the doctor for the first time ever.  The next doctor visit was when he discovered he had cancer, decades later.

While we went from no telephones, to having a community telephone at a nearby country store, to having party lines and you had to remember your code.  Two shorts and a long “rings” a bell with me even nearly sixty years later.  But then from a phone on the wall to one of the desk and then a touch tone phone instead of a rotary…

Have you ever tried stuttering the digits when the rotary dial gets stuck?  “tu – tu – tu” was just like dialing three on the rotary dial is you were good enough.  When our phone broke one time, I pulled it off.  Yes, that is how it worked, making a little popping sound, one for each number on the dial, with “Zero” being ten pops.

Now we have game machines that can become a phone if anyone ever calls.  I am sure that I have been placed on hold so that they can finish the game.  Wait!  You still call yours a smartphone?  Mine has a usage total recorder.  On the day I wrote this, I spent about a half hour on Facebook messenger.  About a half hour on something called the Brain Game, forty minutes on two other puzzle challenges, fifteen minutes crunching some numbers on the calculator, two minutes checking the traffic on the blogsite, and three minutes as a phone.  Three minutes out of over two hours of usage does not make it a “phone.”  And many days, the usage is a lot less, but I usually work on “puzzles” while resting in bed, etc.

But a lot of these advances are nice, but have they really helped?  With all this extra knowledge, is our life better?

It is better if we have Jesus in our life.  Otherwise, I am not sure.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.