Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Thoughts to Ponder

I go down to our farm in Chilton County a lot.  There's lots of trees and plants and grass there.  But there's no t.v. or internet or phone except for my cell.  I can listen to the birds and cut flowers and put them in a vase.  Maybe I work the garden or dig up weeds, but the main reason I go there is because it's quiet.  I can think there.  I'm not tempted to do housework or laundry or watch t.v.  I can be alone with God.  I can be still and think and pray. 

I think that our culture is so tuned in and plugged up that we miss the quiet goodness that nature provides.  We don't have to think because the answers are so readily available to us.  You don't know who Genghis Khan is?  Google him.  You can find out in two shakes of a lamb's tail.  Never heard that idiom used?  Google it.  You'll know where it came from in...  You get the picture.  In all that information, something is lost...  the ability to think things through, to wonder, to dream, to ponder. 

Our world is moving forward so quickly that the "facts" are being lost.  Take the word "crucial."  It means decisive, important, or significant.  That's what a current Webster's dictionary says, but I have an old "Handy Edition" published in 1944 by the John C. Winston Company that defines crucial as cruciform (cross-shaped), intersecting, severe or searching.  How this very useful, modern word came to be is a testament to the Christian heritage of our forefathers.  So, the next time your history teacher tells you its "crucial" that you do your homework, you could tell him/her with certainty that it's not quite "that" important. 

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