This, Our Valley: The Golden Rule is that gold does NOT rule

 

"The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate made of a single pearl. The great street of the city was of gold, as pure as transparent glass.” Revelation 21:21

The days are growing noticeably shorter and cooler. The daytime temperatures are fine, and the overnight lows aren’t all that chilly, but the signs of autumn are all around us.

I notice it most with the wood. Every spring and fall, the wood floors around the house sound like crispy rice cereal. The floors snap, crackle, and pop – which wouldn’t be so bad except they aren’t in sync with the snap, crackle, and pops our joints make when we walk. Uff da!

One of the bathroom doors has also decided to shift on its hinges and rub the floor a tad bit before it closes. What’s worse is it won’t stay open or in place. The whole house seems to be twisting on its axis with the change in weather. 

Then there is the garden gate through which we haul our trash bins each week. The change in air temperature and humidity has swollen the planks on the gate so that they rub the threshold when we open or close it. That situation is quite solvable as all I need to do is remove a couple of the boards and lop off a quarter inch or so. But that sounds an awful lot like work (and I’m supposed to be retired). However, since I work for a certain carpenter “of note,” I really shouldn’t put it off. If the wood has swollen, it’s my job to deal with it. I guess that wood [sic] make me a swell carpenter, eh?

I can see why heaven is described as a place with roads paved of gold, gates made of pearl, and walls made of jasper. God wanted a palace that’s swell – not a palace that would swell!

But that’s not the world we live in. We don’t have streets paved with gold; our streets come in a wide variety of gravel, dirt, asphalt, or cobblestones. They come with plenty of potholes, too. 

We don’t have walls made of jasper; our walls are mostly wood (on the outside) and drywall on the inside. We have a couple of walls in the house where the contractor apparently went to lunch and let it dry unfinished before he returned, so he left it as a monument to his meal. Fortunately, I simply don’t see those blemished walls anymore – a blessing that comes with old age and failing eyesight.

The walls are all functional, of course. Even if the plaster job was done by a plastered mud-guy, it holds paint and hides the wall studs, electrical and plumbing lines, so why should I complain (aside from being a crybaby every now and then)? Life is good.

I’d rather deal with gravelly textured walls than walls of hate. I’d rather drive down roads with an occasional pothole than to act like a pothole (or its metaphorical equivalent).

Edith Bunker (an old television character) once suggested that life on earth is possibly rotten so that when we get to heaven we’ll notice the improvement. That was good for a laugh, but could also be cause for tears. I really don’t think God intends for us to die before we can finally experience peace and happiness.

We are all going to die, of course. That’s part of the circle of life. Until then, though, we have a job to do. There is no retirement from taking care of one another, being just and merciful, and walking humbly, hand in hand with God and our neighbor. God gave us hearts of flesh with which to live and love, not of stone to be erected over our graves.

We need to overcome fear and anxiety by standing together, standing united. We need to stop looking for faults and start finding solutions. We need to stop fixing blame on those with nothing, or who come from other places, and expect better of all the misers who believe their gold has made them gods.

“Those to whom much has been given, much is expected,” said Jesus. God has faith in us; we need to remember that and act like it here in this, our valley.

Keith Axberg writes on matters concerning life and faith. Author of: Who the Blazes is Jesus? Good News for a Vulgar World (available through Amazon in Print and e-book)