Truth or Consequences

Because of a back injury, I missed several weeks of football practice during my junior year. My doctor’s warning was that I would not fully recover from the badly bruised muscles in my back unless I sat out the rest of the season.  I chose to practice and play whenever I was not hurting.  

At the end of my junior year there was a job opening at an S. S. Kresge store as a stock boy. (S. S. Kresge was a five and dime chain and predecessor to the large box K-mart store.) I took the job but the lifting and carrying aggravated the deep aches in the center of my back.  When it came time for football practice in August, I chose to not play, but rather took a different job at the Metropolitan, an upscale clothing store – not to work in the stock room but to be an assistant manager of the “Stag Room” – a young man’s clothing department.  I got the job and learned a lot just in the few short weeks of the back-to-school season.  I liked how busy we were – but I found out later, after Thanksgiving, that there is such a thing as being too busy.

The dunes along Lake Michigan in Indiana.

The Christmas shopping season arrived and we were we in an almost constant rush. The shoppers, those who had cash or credit, and those who had more crafty means of acquiring goods, all competed with one another hurriedly going through the store, sifting through an abundance of stock. When we were not servicing the customers, we were busy cleaning up the messes they made.  (Back then, servicing the customers came first, straightening the stock was secondary.)  

Once, during a break in the action, I leaned back against the curvature of my cash register keys to help relax the muscles in my back. As I did, I said this to a young woman who worked in the adjacent department. “It is hard to believe the way people act that Christmas has anything to do with Christ.”

“I've got news for you. It doesn't” she responded.  I queried her comment and she explained some things to me. I was taken by surprise – and after I thought for a moment, and reminded her that she was Jewish, and may not be a good authority on the subject, she said, “Yes, but I am also a Christian.”  That, if I would have given it much thought at the time, would have been a double paradigm shift. But I didn't give it much thought and therefore that bit of information had little influence on my belief system at that particular time.

Just as for most people, most of the time, the true facts had little impact on my beliefs, on my traditions, things that I have been taught, practiced, and experienced so far in my life. I continued on for a few years, and all that her comment did was give me a jolt and perhaps sparked something that said, “things are not as they seem” and intrigued me to know more about what I had always believed but was not true. What was kindled caught fire a few years later.

Here is the point.  When we learn the truth, and if we stand corrected, if it changes us, we will be given more truth. If we reject what is true or resist being changed by it, we are in danger of setting a precedent and becoming incapable of processing it and benefiting from it.

There are several scriptures that support this principle – and I will leave it to anyone who would like to find an appropriate scripture or two, and post it in the comments section.