There is a saying: “What goes around comes around.” I think that means what we do now may come back to haunt us. It could also mean what the Bible says about the sins of the fathers being visited on the children. It could even mean something questionable done long ago returns again, this time as fashionable.
When our boys were born in North Dakota during the 1970s, we had to drive sixty miles to the Bismarck hospital for their delivery. When Brian was born, his older brother Charles wanted to play with his Mommy on the way home, so little Brian was relegated to sleeping in a cardboard grocery box in the back seat for the trip.
This morning I read a trend has now become fashionable in Scandinavian countries, hospitals giving new parents baby items in a box that can double as its first bed. Several American states are starting their own baby box giveaway programs as well, with, of course, advice and instructions on safe box usage. We can all be sure there are already rules drawn up so the government can regulate our baby box use. Maybe this will even merit a new Cabinet position.
Imagine the horror expressed if anyone today did what we did back in 1974 - drove those sixty miles without little Brian being strapped into an approved car seat! In those days seat belts and car seats were seen as optional. And while I’m certainly not advocating that practice again, it illustrates another use of the saying, “What goes around comes around.”
I just published The Searching Disciple, a study on Ecclesiastes which begins with the words, “There is nothing new under the sun.” (Ecc. 1:9) In it, the writer says history just repeats itself, so don’t get your hopes up. But his thinking is tainted by his cynicism and especially by not knowing there is a Messiah to come who will deliver us from the sins of the past. As we learned back in the sixties, “There’s no new morality, just old immorality in a new form.”
Give thanks today that we see our Savior Jesus in our rear view mirror, forgiving us for our foolishness of the past, and giving us hope as we face today and whatever the future road has in store for us.
“The times really aren’t a-changing all that much.” (This Bob, not the Nobel Laureate)
Rev. Bob Tasler, www.bobtasler.com
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