“READY OR NOT”
I’m always afraid that this story is a parable for persons like me who don’t get their Christmas shopping done early. If the five foolish maidens stand for people like me who may begin to think seriously about Christmas shopping around the third week of December, then we can be sure that all the people who go to summer flea markets and the Dennis Union Auction, then proudly announce right after Halloween that they have all their packages ready for mailing, must be represented by the five bridesmaids who filled their lamps with oil ahead of time.
Last weekend I visited with my neighbors who have four children five years and under, including twin boys who will have their first birthday right after Thanksgiving. Tom and Audrey are superb parents, and the children are all thriving under their care. But my visit made me think again, how can anyone ever be ready enough for the twenty-four hour a day responsibility of parenting?
In a way no one ever can. But ready or not, when the time comes, baby comes, and life proceeds whether we are ready or not. I’m sure that by now Connie Bickford’s daughter Amy and her husband are discovering how intense parenting newborn twins can be.
Raising children is unlike any other responsibility any of us have ever faced. All other considerations of life must be suspended as we learn to respond to the needs and schedule of a helpless child.
And just when we begin to believe that our efforts have made a difference, along comes the turbulence and unpredictability of adolescence. Suddenly all those discussions that we were intending to hold have been thought of too late. All the values we meant to pass along, all the safeguards we were planning to instill, have been postponed just a little too long. And our sometime children may have the distinct impression that everything about us is dated and stifled.
Mark Twain reflected this timeless view of youth when he wrote of himself that at the age of fifteen, he could hardly believe how much his father didn’t know. Then at the age of twenty-three, he could hardly believe how much his father had learned in those few short years.
Surely from the vantage point of parents, we often feel like the foolish bridesmaids: that is, what we know, we learned too late, so arriving at the door, we find that we have been closed out.
In the same way that no one can ever be fully prepared for parenthood and no one can ever be ready for their children to be adolescents, few of us are able to anticipate that in the final analysis we will stand before God and give account of our lives.
At that point, no one can fill our lamps. Perhaps we could compare our lives to a car which has been driven long and hard, but never had the benefit of routine maintenance work. Once the critical systems begin to fail, it is already too late to begin thinking about taking care of the car. As my long-time friend and neighbor Georgia Boomer once said to me as she endured long hours in traction to treat her back, “O Kathy, old people are like old cars, constant maintenance and repair.”
I once attended a memorial service for a friend’s husband. I had never known him, yet by the end of the service I felt that I had a sense of the immense value of his life. In his youth, Joe Maras had played quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers. It was clear that he was a very accomplished person, yet it was not his accomplishments that caused so many persons to remember him.
At the service, each of his three daughters spoke of him, and their deep reverence and love for him shone for all to see. He was a person who put his family first, and now the distinguished careers of his own children seemed to pay tribute to what he had been to them.
He had also been a football coach and dean at
As we come into one of the busiest seasons of the year, perhaps the story of those who were ready and those who were not can help us once again to look with care at our priorities and to consider what matters most.
The wise young women of this story would bid us to get ready in a different way. The light of their well-filled lamps shines far beyond so many shopping days or whatever it is that gets in the way of our lives. That light summons us to prepare our souls, to trim the dimly burning wick of prayer, to turn to Scripture, to perform deeds of genuine love and mercy; then await with expectation that herald call:
The bridegroom comes!
The feast is spread.
Enter now and dine.
Today is Veteran’s Day, and I chanced to chat this past week with a Veteran of World War II who was placing markers and flags at several graves in the Dennis Village Cemetery adjacent to our church. I am a child of that particular war, and I find myself thinking about how different our lives were in the mid 1940’s. In that time every person’s life was affected by the war. Everyone knew several persons who were serving overseas. Everyone knew young men who lost their lives or were wounded. Every household lived and ate differently because of the war.
We kids knew that every week Mom would come home from grocery shopping with a bag of margarine. Giving up real butter was only one of the sacrifices for the war effort which every family made. It looked exactly like a bag of Crisco, except that it had an orange capsule of food coloring embedded inside the bag. Our job was to break that orange capsule and distribute the coloring throughout the bag, so that it looked a bit more like butter. We three kids thought the best way to do this was to throw the bag around in the house like a football, until the whole bag was a nice even yellow. Yes, sometimes the bag cracked and seeped a bit. Perhaps it was because we sometimes really got into the football theme and pulled off a couple of tackles.
But I digress. I found myself thinking this week about the experience of our country being at war in the first years of my life and the experience of our being at war now. My own hunch is that whatever one’s political stance on this war, it would be better today, since we are at war, if there were more ways for all of us to make sacrifices. Today’s kind of war seems to directly involve those serving in
After I had written this, I learned on the news that our national debt has now reached the level of nine trillion dollars. Somehow, in my economy of values, I would prefer to be making personal sacrifices on a daily basis, so that this financial burden would not affect our lives and the lives of generations to come.
I think that when Tom Brokaw gave voice in his book “The Greatest Generation”, he spoke for many of us. We know that World War II caused an entire generation of men and women to grow up very quickly, to mature into a cause that no one would have wanted to face, had there been a real choice. Today, very few of us are faced with being in the thick of war, and we are more like spectators or onlookers.
Yes, we recognize that the cost of gasoline and home heating oil is weighing heavily upon all of us, and I know I do my share of fussing about that. But for the most part, my way of life continues on. I would prefer that just as our soldiers serve their country, we all might have a way to make a contribution, to make a difference that would bring us closer to the peace that we all yearn for.
Like the five maidens that didn’t get their oil lamps filled in time, I am anxious that we won’t have figured out what to do in time to make a decisive difference.
“One hope that we can find in all of this, that though we will be judged, our Judge will be the One who knew that stable birth, that dreadful cross, that liberated tomb; the One who healed and taught and embraced children, fed the hungry, even raised the dead.
So Lord, today let’s pray for all who are a little late or come with empty lamps, including me; that somehow, in your everlasting mercy, there may be a second sitting, or spot beside the door, where we can kneel and watch and catch a glimpse, share a song. In such a hope may we come before your door.” (J. Barrie Shepherd)
Shalom and Amen
“Ready or Not”
Text: Matthew 25:1-13
Rev. Kathleen S. Henry
Veteran’s Day Sunday
November 11, 2007
