I want to offer up a question for you. You know give you something to think about this weekend. It’s really a serious matter, and while I don’t want you to make yourself sick over it, I would like for to consider this. We know the tale goes that a cat has nine lives, although it seems to me I’ve never witnessed one of them get and run off after being pan caked on the street, so how many lives do you have? How many have you already had? The reason I’m bringing this up is simply this, everyday people from all over the world leave home every day, and never return. They didn’t plan to die that day, but they did. Without actually giving it much consideration, we all seem to think that the bad stuff always happens to someone else, but is that true?

Since I’m the one who brought this up, I’ll go first. I’m going to list the “lease on life’s” I’ve been given. At least the one’s I can remember.

1. Checking to see if there were any cars coming up behind me while riding my bike. I did this by changing lanes and looking over my shoulder. I don’t know who the lady was, or how she missed me. I am also sure I didn’t tell mom about it when I got home. I think I was around eight at the time.
2. That thing with getting caught up in the driveline on the Tri Matic Irrigation System was pretty scary. Were it not for a worn out Levi jacket, and Dad being so close, I could have been gone at age ten.
3. Pretty sure it could have been lights when that piece of red-hot cast iron came by my head close enough that I felt the wind. After all it did go through the sheet metal wall of the cotton gin. (circa 1973)
4.  I’m not sure this really counts, but Coach Holt once took credit for saving my life. When I asked him when, he said, “Every Friday night when I kept your butt on the bench.” OK, so maybe that one is a little weak.
5. Let’s see, I think the plane crash probably ranks pretty high on the almost meeting my maker meter. I think that was in the early nineties.
6. Woops, I guess I just bypassed two other events. There was that little matter of seventeen days in the hospital, after playing with a gallon of gas in a very bad location. And…then number seven.
7. I am thankful that the big man knew that fatally injuring another individual was a sin, otherwise I might have turned toes up the night I told Chip Bennett, a former college football star, and NFL alum to sit down and shut up. 

Well, I could most likely keep going, and list a number of other times that I could have died, but I think you get my point. Every one of us has most likely had a few close calls, and I think we need to come to grips with it. So, I want to encourage you to live the rest of your days like each one is your last one, and I want to insist that you live the way God wants you to live. That way if, or when, you become one of those folks who don’t make it back home the next time you leave home, at least you and your loved ones can rest in the assurance that you have actually made it Home.

Till next time,

Grump