Week 20 2013 Digital Losses

I suffered a case of déjà vu recently.  Forty-five years ago I worked at a camper factory in Grants Pass, Oregon, Caveman Campers.  It was a great example of perseverance.  I had recently been discharged from the Navy.  The primary employer in Grant Pass was Caveman Campers.  I had a friend who worked there.  So, every morning I would take him to work, dressed in my work clothes and a bag lunch in hand.  After three weeks of my everyday vigil, a supervisor came up to me, chuckled, and said, “I gotta hire ya.”  The first week he had me setting cabinets in campers as they rolled down the assembly line.  I was terrible!  Try as I may, I could not pick up any speed at this job.  At the end of the week, the foreman came and told me that this was not the place for me.  However, instead of letting me go, he switched me to a different position, making cuts on a table saw.  Forty-five minutes before quitting time, I inadvertently touched the blade with my left thumb.  With the tip hanging by a piece of skin, I went to the foreman and told him I had a problem.  I thought he was gonna pass out.  They rushed me to the hospital where they successfully sewed my thumb back together.  On Monday I returned to my table saw with a thumb guard on my hand.  This was the position for me, for even with the limitations of my bandaged thumb, I was able to get ahead on my list of cuts on the saw.

All of that to lead up to my case of déjà vu.  Recently, while at a camper rally, I was working on making a pen, when a block of wood I was cutting got caught in the saw blade and pushed that same thumb into the blade!  Well, this time it was my sweetie who got excited while she rushed me to the emergency room in Goshen, Indiana.  Once again, the skilled medical personnel was able to put me back together.

However, it gave me pause to consider my digits and what I would do without any one of them.  We are used to having all of our body parts.  When we are unable to use one of them, it becomes somewhat of an inconvenience, to say the least.  God created us to be a whole person, with many functions, all for our benefit.  Yet, He tells us that we would be better off without some parts of our bodies if those parts lead us into sin.  Now, I’m not suggesting that my thumb would lead me into sin.  Nor am I intimating that I was attempting to remove it so as not to be lead into sin by it.  What I am saying is that we would do well to consider how we use our separate parts.  Does the use of our functions bring honor to God, or do we let these functions come under the direction of Satan?  We live in a world that is filled with wickedness.  There is evil at every turn.  A day doesn’t go by without the news reporting some heinous crime committed by someone using the functions of their God-given bodies in ways that God never intended.  While my damage to my thumb didn’t come through the commission of a crime, it did come by my not paying close attention to how I was using that digit.  God has given us this wonderful body.  It is priceless!  We need to consider how we use it.