Many of you being parents, I am sure that you have learned by now that children are willing to make deals for what they want now, but then you have a hard time later when it's their turn to keep their end of the bargain. I'm sure you know what it's like: they want to go to a movie and promise to wash dishes the next day, but somehow they disappear after dinner. Smart parents quickly learn to make them do their work BEFORE they get the treat they want, and everyone is much happier. Funny isn't it how children often have things so backwards.

I was thinking about this the other day, and it reminded me of a story I had read when I was much younger. I can only recall the gist of the book, not the specifics, but in the book our observer apparently was immortal. He had seen a flash that was the end of the world in a nuclear blast, but it wasn't the end. Right after the blast, everyone was very very angry on TV and such, but then they started getting more and more friendly. Do you know what was going on in the story? Let me give you a more focused event and then you might know.

Our narrator noticed a trash pile near his home. Over several days, flowers appeared on it. Very sickly flowers, but they slooooly became vibrant. One day a worker came and put the flowers all over a grave. A woman dressed in black came and took some of them away every day for a few weeks. One day a bunch of people gathered together, including this woman, and they dug up this big box. As the box came out of the ground, more and more people showed up and levitated handfuls of dirt off of it. They opened the box and there was a man inside! The man was taken to a fancy place, where people came in very red faced and crying but left looking merely concerned. Eventually, as you probably guessed, they took the man to the hospital. Then he got an ambulance ride to his house, where they put him in the back yard on the ground with a shovel. The man got up and started to bury rocks in the hot sun, but by the time he finished it was much cooler and the sun was going down (to the east, of course). He went back in the house and had a meal with the woman.

The narrator in the story observed amazing events. He saw workers take skyscrapers apart and fill in the holes where they once stood. Forest trees shrank and shrank until huge areas were just seedlings, but then fires came and planted hundreds of acres of full sized ones. A minority of people in the United States, the Indians, grew and grew in number and defeated the US Calvary and pushed the white men back into the sea until there were none left. The Great Wall of China was taken apart stone by stone and scattered, just as the pyramids were carted away and the blocks returned to the quarries they came from. Volcanoes sucked up red lava. The ice age came and went, and the earth seemed to push the ice north. He blamed it all on the evil people, getting a punishment.

Eventually even less and less people were on the earth, until only 8 good ones remained. Our narrator felt bad for them, especially when they got into a boat with a bunch of animals. Where could they possibly go? But when the rains stopped, the boat taken apart carefully and put back in the forest, there were people again. After all this surely they learned their lesson! But they were so evil again they were reduced down to just two. And after these two sinned, they were reduced down to just one. And finally man lived with God.

Ya know, God has a reward for us. It's free, but we don't deserve it. We can't possibly earn it. He only asks that we obey him now, and that takes effort on our part now. That's the bottom line. Just like children, we may say "give us what we want today and I'll be good tomorrow" but our Father isn't going to fall for that. Tomorrow is too late. God will be with man at the beginning and at the end. (The question is where will you be?)

The pattern God has for us is discomfort today as we struggle in this evil world, and joy tomorrow in the land beyond. The problem with a lot of people is they live this pattern backwards. And you probably thought my story seemed silly!!!

Randy