The Dog Bite that Saved a Family

            Legend tells of the Clark family in Scotland. Many years ago, they had a dream to immigrate to the United States.

            The two parents worked and saved for themselves and for their nine children. After several years, they had saved enough money and had arranged for their passports. They booked passage on a new ship sailing to the United States.

            Seven days before they were to sail, the youngest son was bitten by a dog. The doctor was fearful that the dog had rabies; he ordered the parents to quarantine their son. This meant the family could not sail.

            Mother and father were terribly disappointed. They were angry with their son, and, frankly, they were angry with God.

            Five days after the ship had embarked for America, word spread throughout Scotland that the mighty Titanic had sunk.

            That was the ship the Clark family was to have sailed upon.

            When the father received word of the tragedy, he ran home and hugged his son. He thanked God for saving their lives. What was seen to be a tragedy had in fact been a blessing.

            Perhaps you have experienced a similar occurrence in your life.

            Or maybe you are enduring a set back right now, and someday you will discover that it was a blessing.

PRIORITIES OF LIFE

           A preacher named Tom Harguess wrote a bulletin article a couple of decades ago that I think captured our struggle with affluence. Here is a portion of what he wrote:

            While holding a gospel meeting in Gallup, New Mexico, I began visiting with a lady of the congregation, who had some time ago read an old book on the sinking of the Titanic. It makes you take focus on what is really important in life.

            On April,14 1912, at 11:40 P.M., the unsinkable Titanic struck an iceberg. It sank about 2:20 A.M., and the S.S. Carpathia arrived on the scene to receive survivors at 4 A.M. At the time of the collision there were a total of 2340 on board. Only 745 of that number were rescued.

            What is it to a man who is about to die, to know that there is at hand on the Titanic 3 electric elevators, squash courts, Turkish baths, a hospital with an operating room, private promenade decks, Renaissance cabins, a palm garden, a darkroom for photography, the tapestry of an English castle, and a dinner service of 10,000 pieces of silver and gold.

            In that midnight crisis the one thing needful was not provided, where everything was supplied. The one inadequacy was the lack of lifeboats!

            In our modern world we have many luxuries. The finest homes, the finest automobiles, the finest clothing, the finest food money can buy; many different toys to amuse us. What many don’t have is security of life. A knowledge that heaven awaits us.                                        

           Be careful when you surround yourself with things and leave off caring for your spiritual welfare. “For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?” (Matt. 16:26).

            Well said, Tom. What are our priorities of life?

Titanic Teaching

            The movie TITANIC came out in 1997, but I think it is as popular as ever with girls. I know my two teen-age daughters seem to want to watch every time it comes on TV.

            Terry Mattingly is a nationally syndicated columnist, who typically writes on religious issues. The follow is a column he wrote on the movie TITANIC, just a few months after it appeared in theaters:

‘Titanic’ Theology Sinks on Vice

By Terry Mattingly

Scripps Howard News Service

            Soon after Titanic opened, director James Cameron ventured into cyberspace to field questions.

            One mother described how her young daughter sat spellbound through the romance between a first-class girl trapped in a loveless engagement and a starving artist who liberates her, then surrenders his life to save her in the icy North Atlantic. As they left the theater, the mother said, her daughter noticed older girls weeping.

            “It's OK. Don’t worry,” the child said, giving one girl a hug. “Rose is with her Jack now.”

            “That's so sweet,” wrote Mr. Cameron.

            With receipts of $1.1 billion and rising, Titanic has changed how at least one generation views one of this century's most symbolic events.

            For millions, the Titanic is now a triumphant story of how one upper crust girl found salvation - body and soul - through sweaty sex, modern art, self-esteem lingo and social rebellion.

            Titanic is a passion play celebrating the moral values of the 1960s as sacraments. Rose sums it up by saying that she could abandon her old life and family because her forbidden lover “saved me in every way that a person can be saved.”

            “Titanic reminds me of the distinctions between people of faith and secularists,” says conservative commentator Elizabeth Farah. “While all agree that death is inevitable and very often unexpected, the religious and secularists do not agree on the behavior life's fragility should promote. Those of faith know they may meet their Maker at any moment, at which time they will account for their sins. Their fear and deep love for God inspires them in their constant struggle for righteousness. To the secularist, life is short - get what you want, when you want it, and in whatever way necessary.”

            “The heroes of this modern Titanic fit into this latter category,” says Ms. Farah. “Their sins become virtues because they are rebelling against people who are portrayed as even worse. This isn’t just a bad movie,” she adds. “It is manipulative and fundamentally immoral.”

            Father Patrick Henry Reardon, a philosophy professor and Orthodox priest, goes even further in the next issue of the ecumenical journal Touchstone. The people who built the Titanic were so proud of their technology that they boasted that God couldn't sink their ship.

            Today, the creators of Titanic substitute romantic love as the highest power. Jack is Rose's savior, and he does more than save her life.

            “Had that been all that happened I would not have complained,” says, Father Reardon. “But they made that Christ symbol into a very attractive anti-Christ. The line that set me off I believe also to have been the ... defining line of the film: the assertion that the sort of saving that Jack did was, ultimately, the only kind of saving possible. If that were the thesis statement of the film, then I start looking for the cloven hoof and sniffing for brimstone.”

            I see art—movies, books, TV shows, paintings, music—to be a culture’s Bible. Art conveys, even when the artist does not intend it, the spiritual values of a culture. Consequently, I appreciate Mattingly’s column. It is several years old, but it still makes me think.