SUNDAY: Bible Study - 9:00 AM | Worship - 10:00 AM | PM Worship - 6:00 PM WEDNESDAY: Bible Class - 7:00 PM ~ 8110 Signal Hill Road Manassas, Virginia | Office Phone: 703.368.2622

Walking through Hechts with my wife the other day, I found further evidence to reinforce my theory that women’s fashion reached its zenith in the late fifties (about the time Loretta Young was doing her TV show), and has been on a decline ever since – recently at a more accelerated rate. It was nasty enough that the fashionistas combined shoulder-pads and push-up sleeves in the eighties, and brought back low-ride jeans (for all waist sizes) in the nineties (so the American female could achieve that “old guy plumber” look), but now they’ve brought back coulots (or gauchos or whatever those hideous things are called). Even as a hick kid in West Virginia, wearing my patched bell-bottoms, and my bicentennial tee-shirt I knew that gauchos (or coulots or whatever those hideous things are called) was about as flattering on 99% of females as Speedo swimwear is on 99% of males. Why dredge up the worst fashion ideas from 30 years ago, can’t the trend setters come up with their own wretched ideas?

In the future there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness… II Timothy 4.8

As I was thinking these thoughts (and verbalizing many of them – see how much fun it is to take me to the mall?) I was paralyzed by the realization that the 70’s were 30 years ago! AHHH! That means my high-schoolers are as distant from my teen years as I was from WWII! They are separated from Three Dog Night by the dame distance I was separated from The Glen Miller Orchestra. They are as far away from the Beatles as I was from the Inkspots – as far away from Franky Valli as I was from Rudy Vallee. I’ve had to come to terms with some creepy proximity issues of time and space before. It took a while to get used to the idea of living closer to New York City than to the old home place (I’ve still haven’t adjusted being this close to Philly). I’ve made peace with the fact that when my Dad was my age he was a Father-in-law/soon-to-be-grandpa. But this is somehow more disturbing.

Then again, if we go further back, relative proximity ceases to be much of an issue. What’s the difference in being 350 or 380 years away from Shakespeare’s The Tempest? 200 or 230 years from Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion? My kid’s and I are about 2800 years from Homer’s Iliad, and about 2000 years from the earthly ministry of Jesus.

Proximity ceases to be an issue at all when we stop looking back and look forward. We are all hurtling into the future to a single destination. That day and hour, unknown to any, even the Son – known only to God (Matthew 24.36), is equidistant to us all – young and old, living and dead. The realization of that can be paralyzing. It should be comforting.

There is a wonderful old hymn by the great Quaker writer Phoebe Cary that goes:

One sweetly solemn thought comes to me o’er and o’er:

Today I’m nearer to my home than e’er I’ve been before.

When I was a kid my mom had a couple of Tennessee Ernie Ford gospel albums, and this song was on one. Tennessee Ernie Ford’s arrangement added a chorus where his basso profundo crooned over and over: nearer my home, nearer my home, nearer my home today…. Mrs. Cary’s words and Mr. Fords voice embrace that day – reach out as if to draw it closer.

So does John the Apostle:

He who testifies to these things says, Yes! I am coming quickly!

Amen! Come Lord Jesus. Revelation 22.20

John is exhilarated by the proximity of Jesus coming. His certitude about salvation (it is the same certitude Paul has in II Timothy 4.6ff) makes it so. He says we can be just as certain (John 5.16)

And so also may we say,

Amen. Come Lord Jesus.

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