More Than a Dinner Bell

On a recent weekend, my wife Stacey and I made an effort to clean out our basement.  Over the past couple of months, I had built a small extra storage garage so that I could get some of the junk out of our regular garage.  This led to a total reorganization effort, resulting in a monster pile of goods to donate to charity.  Most of these items came from our basement.  We went through everything making an effort to eschew sentimentality and throw out things we are never going to use.  As we did this, I came across the small pile of items I have been keeping for my brothers and me which came from my parent's home.

When my mother moved to assisted living four years ago and then sold the house and farm in 2013, most of the remaining family goods were auctioned.  What I have in my basement is all that is left.  Among these items are a number of things that would be worthless to most, but they are invaluable to me.  I have my dad's old straw cowboy hat that he wore on the farm.  I have his battered old percolating coffee pot that I saw make thousands of cups in the days before automatic coffee-makers.  I have the dinner bell that originally came from my mother's family farm and was used for generations to call hands in from the field for a meal.  I have an old tobacco stick, tobacco hatchet, and tobacco spike from my teenage years when we raised the crop to put me and my brothers through college.

As I looked at these items, the brevity of life and the fruitlessness of how we often spend it really sunk in.  My parents' life's toil was reduced to a small pile of basically worthless things - the rest was already owned by others.  Things that meant a great deal to them had little meaning for us, or were just no longer needed.  It made me think about all the effort we put into things that will be quickly forgotten when we are gone.  Jobs, cars, houses, clothes, yards, amusements -- there is nothing wrong with these things when kept in the right perspective, but they will matter very little in a few short years.  They will not last.

When was the last time you heard someone on their deathbed say, "I just wish I'd spent more time accumulating things," or "I just wish I had put in more hours of work," or "It would have been better if I'd spent more time improving my house"?  I'll bet you've never heard these statements or even heard of someone else saying them.  You won't, however, have to look very far to find someone who will tell you, "I wish I'd spend more time with my children," "I wish I'd put more effort into my marriage," "I wish I'd mended that strained relationship with my sister," or "I wish I'd focused more of my attention on my relationship with God."

The Bible is full of passages which remind us that our days on earth are few and that we need to be focused on the eternal.  Jesus' brother  (James 4:14) tells us, "You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes."   The prophet Isaiah (Isa 55:6) admonishes us to "Seek the Lord while he may be found; call on him while he is near."   We would be wise to heed the words of C.S. Lewis: “If you read history you will find that the Christians who did the most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.”  There is profound truth in Lewis' statement.

Sometime soon, I intend to erect that dinner bell in my back yard.  Every time I look at it, I hope to be reminded that what my parents passed down that really mattered were the values, faith, character, and memories of time together that they gave me.  That is what I hope to leave with my own children, and someday grandchildren. As my friend and former pastor Kevin Ezell says, "Someday you will die.  People will come to your house and eat potato salad.  Then they will leave." What will remain of me when they leave?  Just a dinner bell, or a life of faith and character that made a lasting difference in the lives of others?  I hope one of my sons takes the dinner bell as a family reminder, but I am far more concerned with the legacy of character I leave them.

Time is short.  We should make the most of it.