Sour days

When I was much, much younger, I attended a lot of movies. Nearly every day I would walk from my aunt's house (which I can't believe they let me do now that I think of it), crossing several busy streets (*at the light, always at the light), to either the library or the movie.

When the time was right, I would then walk the rest of the way to my mother's place of business, the Meridian Manufacturing Plant across from SEars in -- you guessed it-- Meridian.

Movies and reading. They were, they are my thing. Had I to do it all over again, and I don't, I don't, I would have done something with or for the movies. But of course that would have led to me moving away to something exotic like Southern California or New York and I was way, way too much of a coward to do that.

I tell you all that to tell you that yesterday, a day in which I was so busy I never wrote, I took a jar of Kosher pickels out of the refrigerator and remembered instantly (see how weirdly my mind works) going to the movies as a child and almost always ordering a popcorn, a coke and (believe it or not) a big, big juicy dill pickle.

I have not done that for years and years. I don't even know if they still sell them. I don't know why they would. But for an instant yesterday I pulled a dill pickle out of a jar and I was transported like something from Star Trek.

Paul, such a fine writer he could have been a screenplay crafter himself, said this of our childhoods in a letter he wrote to a church he helped create in Corinth, "Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

Those are very famous words in a very famous and well read chapter of the Bible. But what interests me, particularly for this discussion, is that sentence that seemingly sits among the love talk, the one about being a child.

When I was a child, Paul wrote, I talked like a child and I thought like a child and I reasoned like a child. But Paul says he left all that behind when he became a man. He said he put things that were childish behind him.

Do we still do that? Intentionally. Purposefully?

If so then why does childish anger, childish impatience, childish envy still run through our veins so very often?

I know they do mine, and I try so hard to let them go.

I think Paul is telling us that what needs to happen for those things to go away once and for all is for love to take their place. He said that, for this discussion, there is a progression in all of us from the time we accept Christ as our savior, our Lord, our maker and our master that replaces even our thought processes. We were, we are and we are going to be.

Even those of us who try so hard only to fail (and they are in the billions I suspect), understand in a resonable way that we are not who we were. We simply aren't. Maybe we're not even close to whom we seek to be. But we're better in a fruitful manner.

The mirror doesn't lie.

So where is the truth here? Simply this: the pickles that we are, sour and pocked, are not as sour and pocked as we once were.

I went a long way to get there, don't you think?