A Bad Egg
When my father was about seventy-four years old, he decided to open a restaurant by the railroad tracks in Kensett called, appropriately enough, Sheltons’. It opened in 1996 and lasted until early 2001. It was a popular place and had a number of regulars. As a matter of fact, for the Sunday buffet, you could not have thrown a rock in there without hitting someone who worked at Harding. And that alone is something that makes me smile for a couple of reasons. One, because for a good part of my life Harding University has played a major role in terms of being my alma mater, being my employer, being the institution which brought Lori’s family to Searcy which led to our marriage, and the many people at that school who became major influences on my life. Secondly because a prior restaurant my father had shortly after World War II in Searcy was put on a “no go” list by Harding administrators when they discovered some of their students were playing music on the juke box. However, there was no juke box alongside the Sunday buffet at Sheltons’. So, there was no fear of the dangers of 1940s swing music even if gluttony was a real and nearby threat.
One February afternoon, a tornado hit Kensett. Well, a tiny part of Kensett. Witnesses say the tornado dipped down out of the sky, made a direct hit on the restaurant, collapsing the concrete block walls, flattening the dining area, and immediately it lifted back up into the sky. The storm hit on the only day of the week that the restaurant was closed. I could use a lot of space writing about God’s providence just from the above-mentioned facts, but that is not what this article is about.
Lori, the girls, and I lived over in Tennessee during the period of the Kensett restaurant’s existence. On a visit to see our family, and as was customary at the time, we were helping at the restaurant one day. It opened on weekdays at 7:00 a.m., but prep work began much earlier and I decided I would cook myself some breakfast early that morning. As I was frying an egg on the grill, Dad walked by and saw that the egg was sticking. Before I could put a second egg on the grill, he handed me an aerosol can and said, “Here, spray this on there so the eggs won’t stick.” I took it and liberally applied it to the hot grill (probably not the best idea) and proceeded to cook the second egg. A few minutes later, I was enjoying my eggs.
About two hours later, dad walks up to me and said, “Jim, that wasn’t cooking spray I handed you this morning.” Already beginning to feel badly about where this conversation was headed, I said, “So……, what was it?” Dad handed me the can. The first thing I noticed was it said stainless steel cleaner on the front of the can. The second thing I noticed was, on the back of the can, it said something like, “In case of accidental ingestion, contact a poison control center immediately.”
Please understand that until this point in my life, it had never once occurred to me that my own father would poison me, but it had apparently happened. That alone was distressing. Other than waiting to die from a poison egg; the hardest part was having to explain what happened to the guy on the telephone with the poison control center. I could tell this was one of his more entertaining calls. Thankfully, for me, as I read him the list of chemical ingredients on the can, he assured me they all burned up when they hit the hot grill.
Later I got to thinking about how, if I had just taken the time to read, I could have avoided the whole situation. Come to think of it, had Dad just taken the time to read, he could have avoided this too. However, dad once washed his hair with Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion. We knew this because, after his shower, he came into the den complaining to mom about this new shampoo she had bought that didn’t lather. Over time, as my hair has become like Dad’s, and by that I mean gone, I’ve wondered why a bald man was concerned with the insufficient lathering of shampoo. Thankfully, we ordinarily take the time to notice things like this and avoid eating stainless steel cleaner or trying to shampoo our hair with hand lotion. However, when it comes to our spiritual life, just what are we taking in? Or what are we not taking in?
How much time do we spend reading and studying the Bible? How much of our spiritual nourishment only comes from what is spoon-fed to us by someone else or, even worse, by what we see on our phones or television? When it comes to spiritual matters, do we do much thinking or are we content to let others do our thinking for us? I am convinced we would all be so much happier in our Christian walk if we were more active students (disciples) and less passive observers. I don’t know about you, but I know I sometimes do not read the Bible as I should. It is so easy to be distracted when it seems a million different things in our world scream for our attention. The tyranny of the urgent often crowds out what is really important. And reading, knowing, and meditating on the Scriptures is really important. And, even when you are mindlessly frying an egg, what you don’t know can hurt you. How much more so if we are going through life distracted and not looking for God and His Word?
Acts 17:10-12 (NASB) “The brethren immediately sent Paul and Silas away by night to Berea, and when they arrived, they went into the synagogue of the Jews. Now these were more noble-minded than those in Thessalonica, for they received the word with great eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so. Therefore many of them believed, along with a number of prominent Greek women and men.”
May God help us to examine His Word daily with great eagerness.
–Jim Shelton