Water Down the Creek

            I have in my home library Connie Mack’s autobiography. It is an old book, published in 1950. It is a good book.

            Connie Mack was a Hall of Fame baseball manager. His career ranged from the late 1800s all the way to 1950.  Mack retired when he was 87!

            He won more games than any other manager in history; he lost more games than any other manager in history.

            I give this background to say that Mack offers a unique perspective on life. One area on which he is entitled to expound is worry.

            This is what Connie Mack wrote he learned early in his career, “I discovered that worry was threatening to wreck my career as a baseball manager. I saw how foolish it was and I forced myself to get so busy preparing to win games that I had no time left to worry over the ones that were already lost. You can’t grind grain with water that has already gone down the creek.”

            (For younger readers, back in the day, creek water was channeled to grind grain. If the water missed the channel, it was never going to be recovered.)

            Connie offers good advice for life. What’s done is done. Nothing past can be recovered. We have to move on.

            So why worry.

The Fog

The following story is offered on Answers.com:

On July 4, 1952, at the age of 34, [Florence] Chadwick attempted to become the first woman to swim 21 miles across the Catalina Channel, from Catalina Island to Palos Verde on the California coast. The weather that day was not auspicious-the ocean was ice cold, the fog was so thick that she could hardly see the support boats that followed her, and sharks prowled around her. Several times, her support crew used rifles to drive away the sharks. While Americans watched on television, she swam for hours. Her mother and her trainer, who were in one of the support boats, encouraged her to keep going. However, after 15 hours and 55 minutes, with only a half mile to go, she felt that she couldn't go on, and asked to be taken out of the water.

Brian Cavanaugh, in A Fresh Packet of Sower's Seeds, noted that she told a reporter, "Look, I'm not excusing myself, but if I could have seen land I know I could have made it." The fog had made her unable to see her goal, and it had felt to her like she was getting nowhere.

I think, sometimes, we do the same thing when it comes to the pressures of life. Jesus says we allow the worries of this world to choke out our view of Jesus. As one writer has noted, perhaps we should take a page out of Paul’s book and not allow anything to take our eyes off Jesus.

Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me (Phil. 2:12).

By the way, two months later, Florence Chadwick swam the channel.

“Gator-guzzling python comes to messy end”

A few years ago, I came across an article on MSNBC with the aforementioned title. A 13-foot Burmese python, who had escaped his owner or been let go in the Florida Everglades, had come upon a six-foot-long alligator and thought he saw a delicious supper. He was mistaken. What he thought would satisfy his appetite, instead created a mess, according to authorities, of horror-movie proportions.

Frank Mazzotti, a University of Florida wildlife professor, summarized the catastrophe in this way: the alligator evidently clawed at the python’s stomach as the snake was attempting to digest it. When experts arrived on the scene, the alligator’s legs were protruding from the snake’s midsection. By then, the snake was dead.

Through the years, I have seen folks who thought they found the ideal meal to satisfy their appetites, only to arrive at similar ends. Some swallowed substances that created life-destroying addictions. Others found their insides torn up from worry. Still others burned up internal organs from ingesting anger.

Jesus seemed to understand the human appetite is potentially dangerous and we need to satisfy it in a proper manner. After all, it was Jesus who said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”