Ducks

“Two ducks in front of a duck,” said my father, “two ducks behind a duck, and a duck in the middle.  How many ducks?”  That little conundrum from nearly fifty years ago is as puzzling now as it was then.  The answer is, of course, three: but in order to fit, the ducks have to be swimming in a straight line.  To quote a favourite phrase of one of my former bosses, “all the ducks have to be in a row”.

It was to have been a farewell meal.  My friend had been planning to move to another part of the country, but now she explained that her plans had rather fallen apart.  She had a new job lined up, but suddenly her new employer wanted her to start in two weeks time instead of a month, in other words before she could make all the arrangements to move house.  Initially, she had difficulty finding a tenant for her flat, and then, when a likely occupant did arrive on her doorstep, he insisted on being able to move in within a week, which wouldn’t give her solicitor time to draw up a contract, let alone allow her to find and secure a new home some distance away.

In effect, my friend faced the daunting prospect of withdrawing from her new job, staying put for the time being, and starting the whole process again from scratch.  It was probably not over-helpful for me to recite to her, “You didn’t have all your ducks in a row.”  “My ducks,” she replied ruefully, “seem to be swimming all over the place!”

Life seems to be like that for some of us, doesn’t it?  I call it the 'polythene bag syndrome': you flatten one corner, only to discover that the air has formed an annoying bubble somewhere else.  No sooner do we get one bit of life sorted out, than something else goes wrong, or urgently distracts us from what we feel we ought to be doing.  There never seems to be a point where we can say that all is as it should be, and life can be lived ‘properly’.  What’s wrong, then?  Is life not meant to run smoothly? – or do we simply try to cram more into it than it is designed to accommodate?  I suspect that we see someone else’s achievement and think we can do the same, without appreciating the sacrifices he or she has had to make to get there; the problems that are being dealt with behind the scenes.  We think we can have the same success, and combine it with all of our existing interests, not realising that these other things don’t clutter the life of our idol.

Perhaps it would help if we were to focus on the most important things, and let everything else just fall into place.  The writer to Hebrews advised ‘fix your thoughts on Jesus’ (Heb. 3:1); and in the Gospel we find Jesus himself teaching us to seek first the Kingdom of God (Matt. 6:33), and everything else would be given to us.  Or, as the Ned Miller song of the 1960’s almost put it, “Give [God] your love and all of your life, and do what you do do well.”

The Power of Words

 ‘The pen is mightier than the sword.’

attrib. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1803-1873

The words that a pen writes or that a mouth speaks are indeed powerful, but they are a gift from God.  As with all gifts, they bring with them responsibility in their use: St James, for example, charges us to be careful what we say (Jas. 3:1-6).  We should choose our words wisely, lest we cause offence or do unintended damage.

In the ‘Sermon on the Mount’ Jesus develops the thinking behind the Ten Commandments, and at Matt. 5:34-37 we find a comment about ‘You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain (Ex. 20:7)’.  Jesus warns us against making extravagant undertakings and sealing them by invoking God’s name.  If we do so, we have to keep those promises – if they prove to be things we can’t manage, the result is that we are guilty of sin.  It’s far safer, Jesus advises, not to make oaths at all, but simply say ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

Sometimes we say things because we’ve always done so, without appreciating exactly what they mean.  The origin of an expression can be lost behind the frequency and thoughtlessness of its use.  How often, I wonder, does an atheist take leave of someone by saying ‘goodbye’?  Does he really hope that God (in whom he doesn’t believe) will be with his friend? 

The meaning of words can change over the course of time, too.  Few churches nowadays use the sixteenth century phrases of the Apostles’ Creed, and express belief in a God who will come to judge the ‘quick and the dead’.  To us, ‘quick’ means swift in motion, fleet of foot, or perhaps capable of prompt reactions.  When it was first translated into English, ‘quick’ was simply the opposite to ‘dead’, and many people now prefer to replace it in this context by ‘living’.  I must mention too the dramatic increase in ‘issues’ these days.  Far from being confined to something that comes out, like blood or a magazine, today’s ‘issues’ seem to have extinguished ‘matters’, ‘topics’, ‘factors’, ‘contentions’, ‘difficulties ‘and, most of all, ‘problems’.  Have people just become too lazy to be specific about what it is they’re discussing?

I was at a Christian gathering earlier this year where someone told a story of conversion to faith, saying, ‘... and then he got saved.’  It grated at the time, and after a little thought I realised why.  It was the same form of words that would be used of a shopping expedition: ‘he got cereal and then he got butter and milk.’  The implication was that the man had done this himself, in his own power; to any non-believer present it would have suggested that this was actually something that a man could achieve for himself.  A better expression would have been ‘he was saved,’ correctly allowing credit elsewhere for the fact of his salvation. 

As the football season begins, I recall an apocryphal graffito that adorned a ‘Jesus Saves’ sign: ‘... but Satan nets the rebound!’  We must always be aware of the rebounds, those times where the Evil One is only too ready to take advantage of our mistakes.  So let’s resolve now to ‘engage brain before opening mouth’; remember that ‘CARELESS talk costs lives souls’