James 4:13-5:3
James 4:13-5.3a: "Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit.' — yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, 'If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.' As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin. Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire."
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In mid-September of this year Barbara and I took our first-born son to college. We had planned and coordinated our return from California to land at Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport (DFW) at the precise time that would allow us to get to an event being held that evening that we had promised to attend. It was a good-bye party for some dear friends, and we wanted very much to be there. We actually changed our flight so that we could get back in time. Everything was going great until we approached Dallas, and I noticed a lot of stormy weather out the window. Our pilot adeptly brought the plane in through the storms and landed on the tarmac at DFW. He came on the PA and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, I have some good news and bad news. The good news is we are on time; the bad news is that no planes have left this airport in the last two hours. Every gate is jammed, and we are going to have to sit on the runway for an hour."
I turned to Barbara and said, "Two hours."
And I was right. I'm no genius, but he said no planes had left for two hours and the flight schedules were behind two hours, so I knew it would be two hours before we got a gate. Every bone in my body was protesting. I was screaming internally with rage, but externally trying to be very nice and polite and pastor-like. But I was very upset. We had rearranged our plans, we had come home early, we were suppose to be somewhere. Now I was going to sit on the runway for two hours. My wife, who can read some things that I am thinking now and then, looked over at me and simply said, "Skip, heaven rules."
I was a little upset that she had delivered a sermon to me with just two words (which is a lot pithier than I could ever do!). I was still protesting internally. I thought of all the letters I needed to write to the management of the airline to tell them how to better handle the situation. I was figuring out strategies like moving the planes at the gates out, letting ours come in and unload the passengers, then let the planes go back out. I had it all mapped out.