BEHAVING AS VISITORS OUGHT

We have many visitors at our house, scores and scores of them from far and wide every year, and we enjoy everyone of them. They are like our grandchildren: we are glad when they come and glad when they leave! Seriously, we gain more than we give when these sojourners come our way. Ouida and I often marvel at how different God’s children are from each other, and we sometimes wonder how a certain man and a certain woman ever made it to the altar together. The Lord does wonderful things, doesn’t he?

We would be more than amazed if a visitor ever backed a van to our front door and unloaded his belongings and became a permanent resident. Even Ouida would be nonplussed!

While we all may sometimes stay longer than we should, we keep our perspective and never forget that we are visitors. We keep saying such nonsense as “Don’t go to any trouble,” knowing full well that company is always trouble. It is better to say, as I usually do even when visiting kinfolk, “We will be there only two nights, so it won’t last long.” In any event we never forget that we are company and we never settle in for good. And as a rule we are on our good behavior and do not do such things as go to the breakfast table in our shorts, or even with our hair still rolled up. We behave as visitors ought, usually, don’t we?

In this morning’s reading in the Scriptures (you see that my little essays are sometimes spontaneous), I was led to ponder the role of a visitor while looking at I Pet. 2:11 in the Jerusalem Bible: “I urge you, my dear people, while you are visitors and pilgrims, to keep yourselves free from the selfish passions that attack the soul.”

This injunction reaches out to us where we are most vulnerable: being in the world it is so easy to be like and think like the world. And the world’s most deceitful ploy is the illusion of permanence. While everyone is of course aware that death eventually comes, it has no impact upon their lives and does not influence their behavior. Being out of sight death is out of mind. And so people act as if they are going to be around forever. They certainly do not think of themselves as visitors and pilgrims and that in awhile they will be going elsewhere.

If we do not watch that will also be our conception of life. That is why an apostle of Christ urges us to keep in mind that we are but visitors in this world and that we are to behave that way. We are able to adjust our thinking to the fact that the children will be up and gone in another ten years, or that we will retire in a few more years, but it is more difficult for us to face the reality that we will be “going home” in another twenty years or so.

That is what Peter is saying to us. This world is not our home, and when we leave this world we are not leaving home but going home. Those who created E. T. (one of our readers wrote that she saw the film several times and wept and laughed all the way!) caught this idea beautifully. E.T. may have enjoyed his sojourn on planet Earth, but he never forgot that he was a pilgrim and he knew where home was. We are not all that wise, for we act as if we are to be here forever. We have backed up our van and unloaded our belongings, including our values. We are here to stay! Or so it would seem.

I was reminded of this when counseling with a woman whose home was breaking up. She was concerned that as a divorcee she might not make it financially. Knowing something of her resources and realizing she had already lived most of her years, I had no better sense than to say something like “Unless you plan to pass your estate along to someone else, you are going to have plenty to live on for the remaining years.” You would have thought I had slapped her. She did not want to be reminded, even if she was a believer, that we were talking about only a few more years.

This is one area in which I have disciplined my thinking fairly well, perhaps too well, for I am very conscious of the brevity of life, and virtually every day those words of the psalmist tiptoe across my mind: Teach us to number our days that we might apply our hearts unto wisdom. I realize that everything is numbered, not just the years, but the days with Ouida, the hours I spend at this typewriter, the moments I spend in prayer. Even now Ouida and I are planning to buy or build a new home, something smaller and with but one story, but we are well aware that, except for a few years, we will be building for someone else. And that is OK. What is not OK is for us to be deceived by the world into believing that there is anything permanent about our way of life. We are bound for glory! Nothing else really matters all that much.

Ouida just came into the workshop to cut some plates for our next mailing (well over a hundred new subscribers so far, she tells me), and planting her on my knee I read her this article up to this point, seeking her counsel. She not only approved but told me a story that I will pass along to you, something she had read from stuff mailed to her mother, who lives with us.

There was this man who went into eternity. Expressing concern for his children, St. Peter told him not to worry for they would be along in a few minutes. Then added, “And in a few minutes after that your children’s children will be along!”

From the aspect of eternity it might well be something like that. What is important is that we not allow the world to sell us a bill of goods, including a false concept of time. It is later than we think, and so we must apply our minds unto wisdom. Keep growing! Keep learning! Keep serving! Time is of the essence and we must be good stewards of every hour. What is time anyway? Not years and weeks and days and hours; they but measure time. Time is experience, and it is the experiences we have that count, such as meaningful conversation, prayerful meditation, and doing something for someone else. When death marks the end of such experiences in this world, they but continue in a more glorious way in the world to come.

And that is the real conflict in this world --- not so much between matter and spirit, but between the values of this world and the values of the world to come. This world’s values, whether houses or TV or General motors stock, are OK insofar as they go, but they are counterfeits when placed alongside the values of the world to come. So we must live in this world by the ethics of the next world.

That is what Peter means when he says, while urging upon us a pilgrim consciousness, “keep yourselves from the selfish passions that attack the soul.” We are constantly under attack by the faulty ethics of the world, such as “Everybody does it,” and so we must guard against selfish passions. But how? By a pilgrim consciousness! This world is not our home; our citizenship is in heaven. Ouida and I spent an evening recently at a fancy hotel with the Harvard Club of Dallas, sitting with big-time lawyers, doctors and financiers. It really wasn’t our kind of world, but we made it fine and perhaps made a slight contribution to the affair. But it didn’t matter all that much anyway, for we were but visitors, even if an alumnus.

This whole world is like that. There is a sense in which I love it, like the Father did and does, and I might even die for it. I will certainly seek to make it better during my short sojourn. I am in the world but not of it. I will serve it but it will not be my master. I may be confined to it for the present but it does not and never will own me. Like that night at the Harvard Club, I am here for the moment and I will serve for the moment, but it is only for the evening, for tomorrow I go home. Like E.T., I know where home is, except that mine is for real! --- the Editor