Articles
Up A Size
Did you perchance hear about the little boy who was looking at the family photograph album with his mother? As he pondered a particular picture of a fine-looking young couple on their wedding day he proudly said, “She’s pretty. That’s you, isn’t it Mama?”
“Yes Junior, that’s me”, his mother responded.
“Mama”, he asked, “who’s that man with the great big muscles and all that black hair with you?”
“Why Junior, that’s your Daddy”, she answered.
With a perplexed look, the curious boy then asked, “Then Mama, who’s that fat man with the bald-headed haircut who lives with us now?”
John Lennon wrote, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." For a surety, life is and does many things. One thing it doesn’t do is sit still. Life’s kinda like that rolling stone that gathers no moss you've maybe heard of. It’s in a state of constanttransition, all too rapidly moving from one scene to the next. All of us old enough to care or notice realize this as we take down our old calendar and put up a new one to begin another year. And maybe even more apparent is our perception of the time span between birthdays shrinking more and more. They do roll around a bit quicker every year, don't they?
Slowly but persistently (some would say relentlessly), life moves on. We don’t always see how the transition is working because its effects on us are most usually gradual in nature. We just don’t, by the good graces of the Lord, notice them all at once. Were we only to have access to a mirror, were we to see our reflection say once every ten years or so, we'd see our lives in a whole new perspective. And, we’d know that while all the vitamins, all the wrinkle reducers & removers, all the make-up, make-overs & miracle cremes, all the hair coloring, hair tonic, hair pieces, and all the "whatever elses" may’ve provided us an illusion (in some cases a delusion) of staying young, we’ve not been exempted from the daily exercise known as aging.
But life’s transitions include a whole lot more that keeping Lady Clairol, Geritol, and Polygrip in our “medicine”cabinet; a whole lot more than avoiding scales and mirrors; a whole lot more than going up a size in clothing.
As we make the transitions of life (and we all will), Christians should be able to notice a difference in the way we act and the way we react to the things going on around us. Our moods and our emotions hopefully work not only to our own good, but to the greater good of others. Rushes to judgment are replaced with calm reasoning. Assumptions are replaced with giving benefit of doubt. Expectations are tempered with patience. We go up a sizein careful understanding and wisdom.
As a result, associations with others are affected in the transition. Ties that bind are bound, friends become family and even temporary separations sadden us just a bit. We finally reach an understanding of “do unto others” (Luke 6:31). We finally become “our brother’s keeper” (Gen 4:9). We go up a size in relationships.
Of course, there’s that dreaded final transition of dying. Unavoidable, inevitable and inescapable, it’d really be depressing were it not for the fact that those who live in the Lord know something the world chooses not to know.“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” (Hebrews 13:8) And as the sun goes down on our lives, as our shadows grow longer, this knowledge causes us to go up a size in security.
The Lord has blessed us along the way with gentle but definite reminders of His intent to "keep things moving" in this life.
“While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” (Genesis 8:22)
If we’ll but pay a little attention, we can see yet another way He blesses us. Now and again, He will give us a day right smack dab in the middle of winter that’ll have just a scent of spring. You may not see it. You may not be exactly certain from where it came. But somehow from somewhere, you just ever so briefly catch a whiff of something that let’s you know, even in the dead of winter, life is just around the corner.
That’s the way it is for the child of God. We can know, regardless of the impending cold and darkness of the grave, life is just around the corner. Because every day of this transition from life to death to life, we go up a size in faith!
