All my life, I’ve had a low threshold for boredom. I don’t like being bored (which explains why I don’t do a lot of things) and I don’t like boring people–if I know it and can help it! And that explains a lot of my preaching, I suppose.

The Lord has wonderfully blessed my life with such variety that it prevents me from being stuck in a rut. My days are never the same and endlessly full of joy.

Take this week, for instance….

Sunday, I took a friend to church with me. He’s a new believer, even though he’s only a few years younger than me. I’m more or less introducing him to various churches. We talk about what to expect before we get there, I whisper to him a few times in the service (“That’s the visitor’s attendance slip; fill it out if you want to, but you don’t have to”), and I introduce him to people. When the pastor baptized last Sunday, I leaned over and remarked that “this is how we baptize, although every pastor does it pretty much his own way.”

We stood in the parking lot after church and talked about the sermon. The pastor had spoken on having a heart for God. My friend said it had really spoken to him. I said, “You know you can come back here any time you wish. You don’t need me with you.” He laughed. “Joe, going to church with you is like attending a baseball game with George Steinbrenner. You know everyone.”

I’ve smiled at that ever since.

Two days later, Steinbrenner made the front pages of the nation’s papers. A heart attack took him at the age of 80. People were falling all over themselves to praise him. Which is all right, of course. There’s little to be gained from saying that in addition to all those great things he did, Steinbrenner was brutal on those who worked for him.

One fellow said Steinbrenner fired him one night. “The secretary called me later and told me I was not fired, to come to work the next day. I came in at 9 o’clock instead of 8. George saw me and said, ‘This office starts work at 8 o’clock. Come in late again and you’re fired.'” Johnny One-note. It seems the only way he knew to motivate people was to threaten to terminate them. That’s sad, if you ask me.

That was Sunday. Then, on Monday….

I finished a massive writing assignment for Baptist Men Online, a ministry of the North American Mission Board. I told my wife I was giving myself the afternoon off, and going to a movie. The Tom Cruise/Cameron Diaz flick, “Knight and Day” was just the kind of noisy escape film I needed. Completely unlike anything in my life. Pure fun.

Tuesday, I received a phone call about a friend’s father who was on life-support. That afternoon, I sat in the hospital room with the family as they discussed unplugging him from all the contraptions keeping him alive.

My friend said, “Dad’s 87 years old and we have so much to be thankful for.”

He laughed, “He loved to take us fishing. How many fathers do you know who bought a vacant lot so the kids of the neighborhood would have a place to play?”

He introduced me to the nurse named Harold. My friend said, “Harold used to be a lawyer.” I said, “Wait a minute. You were a lawyer and quit to become a nurse?”

“I did,” he laughed. I said, “Tell me in one sentence why.” Harold said, “I wanted to feel good. I was tired of feeling bad.”

His law practice had dealt with family matters. “The only way to win there is by having someone lose. I could make some people happy but it meant making others unhappy. And that is not who I am.”

His wife was supportive, so he gave up law and went back to school and became a nurse.

I said, “And now you feel good?”

“Most of the time,” he smiled. At that moment, he was standing by the bedside of his comatose patient. He said, “I lost a patient last week and one the week before that. But I had done all I could to make them comfortable. I felt good about that.”

I made a passing remark on how some doctors had admitted to me that they begin withdrawing emotionally from a patient who is not going to make it. Harold said, “In this hospital, no doctor gets that close to the patients. They will walk in here, look at the chart, pat the gentleman on his hand, and say, ‘You’re doing fine,’ and walk out.”

While we were chatting, the mother of my friend–the wife of the patient–told us of an experience the family had in Arkansas some years back. One of those weird things that never leaves you.

“We had stopped in the Ozarks at a scenic overlook. My son here was taking our picture. He kept backing up and backing up and suddenly he disappeared. He had fallen off the side of the mountain. What caught him was strands of barbed wire. They were cutting into his back but they had saved his life.”

He said, “I still have the scars.”

His mother said, “We managed to get him into the car and drove into the nearest town to a clinic. The doctor was so nice and took good care of him. That is, for a few minutes.”

“At one point, he said, ‘Where are you folks from?’ And when we said, ‘New Orleans,’ he exploded. ‘That ungodly city! Bourbon Street!'”

“He looked at us with total disgust. When we went to pay him, he refused to take our money. He said, ‘It’s tainted!'” He asked them to leave.

She smiled. “After we drove away, we decided that even though we were thoroughly perplexed by the man’s ignorance or prejudice or whatever it was, he saved us a tidy sum of money!”

There’s no figuring some people. Turns out they’re not actually from New Orleans proper but a suburb, the way most of us are.

A request came in the mail from a Baptist Foundation executive with one of our state conventions. They’re printing up a book of articles by their leader and will need as many as 25 cartoons to illustrate it. I got to work on it Monday night.

Tuesday night, I had dinner with a pastor and his wife who are close friends. Knowing their teenage children, I was pondering what to take along as a little gift. In Sam’s Club, I found just the thing: a three-pound bag of M and Ms, the peanut kind. Jake, the pastor’s son, almost flipped when he saw them.

Encouraging pastors and their families. Anytime I can do that, I will.

Twenty years ago, as we were leaving one pastorate and not knowing where the Lord would be re-assigning us, I made three vows to the Father: to live simply, give generously, and encourage pastors.

Those three still loom large in my mind and heart today.

So, mid-way through the week, here’s how I have spent my time as a retiree….

I’ve written articles, drawn a dozen cartoons, visited the hospital, dined with a pastor and his family, and laughed more than my share. I’ve read the Bible each day and prayed and done husbandly things around the house.

And I have reflected on how gracious the Father is to me. Living the life of a retiree and trying to leave my Guidestone retirement account alone as much as possible to see if it will rebuild from the economic fiasco of the last few years, summertime invitations to preach have been rare.

But the invitations to write and to draw have been numerous.

Most of the rest of the time, I’m reading. At lunch, at red lights, in the late afternoon, in bed at night. And sometimes in the wee hours of the morning when sleep eludes me.

The other day I discovered a jewel. A 1941 hard-bound volume by Virginia Cowles, a journalist who covered the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s, Berlin of the late 1930s, and London during the Blitz. “Looking for Trouble” (Harper Brothers) is as first-hand as they come.

The book is a veteran of the Second World War, incidentally. Stamped in various places throughout are these marks: 1)Post Library, Redstone Arsenal, Huntsville, Alabama; 2) Property of Library, Army Air Base, Kearney, Nebraska; and 3) Property of U. S. Army.

No telling who has read this book.

Here are a couple of items from it….

Cowles attended the giant ralllies in Nuremberg in the late 1930s. With a French journalist named Bertrand de Juvenel, she saw Hitler and his henchmen up close. The two sat in beer halls and interviewed the over-zealous Nazi officers. Outside, Bertrand said to her, “They’re like children. Why anyone ever lets them play with explosives, God knows!”

At the massive Nuremberg rally–attended by perhaps a half million people–she watched the worship of Adolf Hitler. She writes:

At last it was over. Hitler left the bos and got back in the car. As soon as he stopped speaking the spell seemed to break and the magic vanish. That was the most extraordinary thing of all: for when he left the stand and climbed into his car, his small figure suddenly became drab and unimpressive. You had to pinch yourself to realize that this was the man on whom the eyes of the world were riveted, that he alone held the lightning in his hands.

Cowles walked around the city and was struck by the way the Nazi displays worked to overpower the mind.

“Everything that was done was done on a gigantic scale. The power of the spectacles lay not so much in their ingeniousness but in their immensity. The keynote was always repetition and uniformity. Instead of a few gilt eagles there were hundreds; instead of hundreds of flags there were thousands; instead of thousands of performers there were hundreds of thousands.”

In the rally, she saw the same emphasis on bigness:

“The demonstration that followed was one of the most extraordinary I have ever witnessed. Hitler climbed to his box in the Grand Stand amid a deafening ovation, then gave signal for the political leaders to enter. They came, a hundred thousand strong, through an opening in the far end of the arena. In the silver light they seemed to pour into the bowl like a flood of water. Each of them carried a Nazi flag and when they were assembled in mass formation, the bowl looked like a shimmering sea of swastikas.”

“Then Hitler began to speak. The crowd hushed into silence, but the drums continued their steady beat. Hitler’s voice rasped into the night and every now and then the multitude broke into a roar of cheers…. I looked at the faces around me and saw tears streaming down cheeks. The drums had grown louder and I suddenly felt frightened. For a moment I wondered if it wasn’t a dream; perhaps we were really in the heart of the African jungle….”

A friend of mine once told me his grandfather lived in Germany during the Second World War. “Hitler fooled us,” he explained to his grandson. “He hoodwinked us.”

Too simple, if you asked me. Something within the human soul enjoys being hoodwinked and even goes searching for hoodwinkers.

We–all humans–desperate need a Savior and not just from the Hitlers of this world. We need to be saved from our own wayward, ugly, grasping, shallow, self-centered and idolatrous hearts.

There is only one Savior worthy of the name and that Name is Jesus.

This week I’ve been on Facebook with a friend in a distant state who has shared with me her life story. She began life in a fairly normal middle-class home in a small town, married an abusive husband, joined a religous cult because the people who came to their door were nice–even though she thought their doctrine was terrible–and finally, years later, emerged into the sunlight of God’s forgiveness and His grace. She worships in a fine “Christian” church in her city. She’s growing in Christ.

There is no joy like the joy of the abundant life in Jesus Christ. (John 10:10) It’s a lot of things, but one thing it definitely is not is boring.

Thank you, Father. Thank you, Jesus.