The Pastor’s Piece – December 5, 2021
The Pastor’s Piece
FCFI
December 5, 2021
Birthdays must be good for you because statistics show that people who have the most, live the longest. (Anonymous)
I like to write. I write this column, a church newsletter, plus a note on the back of our Sunday bulletin, a sermon, an adult Sunday School class, and a Thursday Bible study lesson. Every class I teach gets a handout with my notes printed out. Sometimes I overlap the content. Most of the time I don’t. Some people enjoy what I write, others are offended by it.
Every year, when we set the clocks back in the fall, and it gets dark at 5 o’clock, it reminds me of the fact that our days are short too. Psalm 103:15-16 says: “Our days on earth are like grass; like wildflowers, we bloom and die.The wind blows, and we are gone – as though we had never been here”
It’s tempting, but I don’t try to please my audience. I want to please the One who has given me the ability to write. The days are short. God’s message is written out for us word for word in the Bible. In Romans 10:14 the Apostle Paul asks the question: “How will they hear without a preacher?” A reader (whom I never had the chance to meet) once wrote and said I was the only preacher he ever had. That’s one reason why I write what I write.
Last week the Supreme Court of the United States heard aruguments in favor of, and contesting, Mississippi’s new abortion law making it illegal for a mother to abort her baby after 15 weeks into the pregnancy. That law is being contested as unconstitutional.
If the Supreme Court upholds the Mississippi law, that will mean all 50 states can make their own abortion laws independent of each other. That would nullify (or at the least minimize) the Court’s 1973 Roe v Wade decision making abortion legal in all 50 states. In other words, the “right” to abortion would not be the unquestioned law of the land, it would be decided by each state, according to the will of the people in each state, not by a handful of people in Washington, D.C.
The Supreme Court will hear all the arguments then decide and announce their decision in June, 2022. If they vote in favor of the Mississippi law, abortion activists are going to erupt and our whole country will be in an uproar again. It will be a mess. Even now, it is reported, there is huge pressure being put on the members of the Supreme Court to overrule Mississippi’s new law. We need to pray for the justices.
While all this is happening, life goes on down in the trenches. The other night I decided I needed to check our cattle that we had recently let out on corn stalks. We put up a one wire electric fence around the perimeter of the field to contain the cows. (That is not much containment). I took the 4-wheeler and went around the outside of the fence to check on them just before dark. I figured I’d see them and then head back to the buildings. Well, I didn’t see them right away so I decided to take the 4-wheeler under the fence and into the field to look around. I had to dismount in order to clear the fence. With the 4-wheeler in gear, and me standing on the ground beside it, using a corn cob as an insulator, I carefully lifted the wire with my left hand and taking my right hand off the brake, I gave the 4-wheeler a “little” throttle. A little must have been a lot because it lurched forward and I lost my grip on the handle bars. It went under the wire and headed across the field unmanned. I rolled under the wire and took off in a dead sprint after it. Then the corn stalks tripped me up and I went head over heels. I still had time to catch it so I got back on my feet and took off again only to get tripped up again. I then watched helplessly as my 4-wheeler took a sharp right turn now going down hill and directly toward the adjacent fence. It got to the wire, but kept right on going, taking the wire with it, ripping the insulators off, bending the posts, and finally breaking the wire in two. I finally caught up to it on the uphill side of the field. I found the cows, chased them into the barn, and closed the gate. It was dark by then and I decided to wait and fix the fence the next day. I went to bed angry that night. In the morning, when I couldn’t figure out who or what I was angry at, I let it go and fixed the fence. The cattle are enjoying their corn field.
A fence lasts three years, a dog lasts three fences, a horse three dogs, and a man three horses, (German proverb).
(Kevin Cernek is Lead Pastor of Martintown Community Church in Martintown, Wisconsin)