Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the Itteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is tabt the frist and Isat Itteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitU raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey Iteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Could you read the above paragraph easily? I confess that I could. My spell checker sure didn't care for it, though!!! It's kinda funny, if I had just one word misspelled in a sentence it would stand out vrey clearly but put a bunch together and you can fly over it and know just what it says, at least I can, so quickly that you might not have noticed at first that there's something wrong. Many people don't. Now the source I got this from asks the question - have we always had minds like this, that absorb things in such a way, or is this a phenomenon of the computer age? In other words, since most of us get emails from people every day and many people don't spell so well, maybe we have trained our brains inadvertently to simply tolerate it.

Well, why not? Hang around a construction site or onboard a ship of the navy and you will probably hear some pretty offensive language. However, after a while only the most offensive words stand out and the "lesser" swearing becomes unnoticed. On the other hand, chill with some more Godly friends and even one of these "lesser" swear words stands out. One more reason we should be aware of who we spend our time with, and how much others influence us even when we think they don't. By the way, I use the word "lesser" to signify words that are quite improper but considered by the world to be so casual that they have lost their potency. Such words simply no longer shock anyone, because we as a culture have grown to tolerate them. That doesn't change their meanings, or their consequences, however!

Switching gears a bit, I want us to consider something that we really can't help but notice, but instead of being something we notice by its presence we take note of by its absence. They are round, usually steel, and quite featureless on the top. The bottom, if you should happen to see one upside down, is pretty strange looking (not at all like they appear in cartoons!) so much that you might not at first know what they are. There's an old science fiction story about a chocolate one, and once thieves stole a whole bunch of them and took them down to the recycle plant hoping to make money from selling them as scrap, where the thieves got arrested (duh). I think I have mentioned them before in a bulletin, if not I should have. In Nashua they are often triangular shaped, which is really cool.

Know what I am describing? If you don't then they are doing their job just fine. However, try driving down a road where these things, manhole covers, are missing, and you are likely to snap an axle, or lose control of your car, or some other awful thing. We don't consider manhole covers very often, but chances are you drove over a whole slew of them coming to services today. Manhole covers are a whole lot like God. They support you when you need them, they are rarely thanked or appreciated, but let them be missing and it can get very bumpy indeed. They may appear plain but there's a lot more going on underneath that' you don't know about, all good for you. Yes, God is very much like that.

You see, it's not just "swear words" that we get "tolerant" of. It's not just swearing that we can grow to overlook. We can grow "tolerant" of God, too, and take Him for granted. But one day, if you happen to be driving along the road of life and you hit a manhole without a cover, maybe you should ask yourself: who was it that overlooked putting God in your life?

Randy