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Parables
of the Pastor’s Cats
Pleasant Places
We celebrate anniversaries
at our church every twenty-five years or so. It doesn't happen at every
church. You have to be in a place that's been around a while.
And we have.
I had the pleasure of
serving at the church around the time of the 125th Anniversary. I had
just arrived and wasn't working many hours, so I could just relax and
enjoy the stories and the worship and the people.
The work fell to a number
of committees and individuals who took care of a lot of planning,
setup, and cleanup.
One task was to choose an
appropriate
Bible verse for the occasion. We still have it on a banner that hangs
on the
church wall.
The Lord
is the portion of my inheritance and my cup.
The lines have fallen to
me in pleasant places.
Indeed, my inheritance is
beautiful to me!
Psalm 16:5-6
Beautiful. You can look around and see
what God has given us, and it's beautiful.
When my wife and I first took in a few cats
at home, they were
brought in to work. We had rodents of a rather large size, and so we
needed cats to hunt and kill.
But one of the first items on their list of
things to do was the finding and claiming of comfortable places to sit
and snooze the day away.
Even when they hunt, cats still reserve a
large portion of the day for relaxation. And to properly relax, you
need a good relaxing place. They would climb trees and sleep in the
cool breeze, nestled in a crook of a branch. They would slip under the
shade of long-leafed flowers and disappear in the cool shade.
And they would lie in a pail on the front
porch.
For a housewarming gift, someone had given
us a pail full of flowers.
Don't ask me about the flowers. I don't know much about them. They were
just small purple flowers, and the pail
was thick with them.
After a while, you could look at the pail
and see the shape of a cat pressed into those flowers. PJ was the
worst. He would curl up on that soft bed with his face hanging over the
edge of the pail like a king on velvet.
It was a pleasant place. A good place. A
rich gift passed on for his enjoyment.
These days, it seems more popular for a
church to have a vision for the future, rather than a memory of the
past. But if you don't look back once in a while, you might not
remember how rich your inheritance is, and who gave it to you.
That's why we celebrated the anniversary.
Because God had shaped in our lives a beautiful inheritance.
Tomorrow I will face the rodents of this
world. Today I will remember God's wonderful gifts.
And I will rest in the pleasant place God
has given me.
(You can read all of Psalm 16 in your
Bible. Verse 8 and verse 11 are particularly fun.)
Open my eyes so that I might see great and
wonderful things in your word.
Psalm 119:18
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