Unsafe At Any Speed

The Rich Fool - Luke 12:15-21

15Then he said to them, "Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions."
16And he told them this parable: "The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. 17He thought to himself, 'What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.'
18"Then he said, 'This is what I'll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. 19And I'll say to myself, "You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry." '
20"But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?'
21"This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God."

I draw your attention to the above not as an example of who will get into heaven and who will not but more as an example of the frame of mind we should exercise during the time we are given to occupy space on this earth.

I suppose my earliest recollection of dealing with death and dying was the death of my grandfather. I was around maybe ten or so and could barely fathom what was going on. Probably my most profound experience of our mortality was at the death of my friend Hugh Don Lindsey when I was a senior in high school. Four of my friends made a day time run to a near by town all of us teen agers liked to visit from time to time. My friends traveled to their destination in an automobile made famous by it's poor handling characteristics which were pointed out by a now famous consumer advocate named Ralph Nader in a book titled, "Unsafe At Any Speed." Nader was an advocate for the removal of this automobile from the market due to it's unusually high accident record. My High School friends and I discovered, first hand what it meant to be, "Unsafe at any speed."

As they were traveling back home in their Chevrolet Corvair, the driver lost control and the car left the highway colliding with a tree. Hugh Don was riding in the back seat and was thrown from the car against a tree and died instantly. Another of my friends was riding in the front seat, was thrown from the car through the trees , and wound up with a broken back which left him paralyzed on the right side for life. The driver and one other back seat passenger got out without a scratch. It seamed to everyone at the time that this was such a tragic and pointless loss of young lives.

Recently, an obituary of a local young woman appeared in the news paper. She was only 21 years old. Of course not many details were given in the obituary but since my wife had worked with her at the high school, she was privy to the details. I won't go into a lot of detail but suffice to say, she died suddenly and unexpectedly of a brain aneurysm. She was home visiting with her mother when she declared she had an awful head ache. They rushed her to the hospital to no avail because she was dead upon arrival. Again, another tragic loss of young life.

The object is and the point of the Bible verses above is, we never know what the next hour will bring so we should be of the frame of mind to be ready to go. One of our dear sweet ladies at our church passed away with complications of lung cancer yesterday evening. Three weeks ago, she appeared to be as healthy as any other septuagenarian in our congregation. She came down with pneumonia. They took her to the hospital and shortly after the doctors informed them she had inoperable lung cancer. They started chemotherapy on her but I suppose it was too much too late.

I am working on a post about the so called "war" on cancer. Studying about the thirty year history of this "war" has proven so far to be quite interesting. However, it just serves to emphasize how brief life can be and that we need to be ever mindful of how fragile life is.