vitalwholeness

Good friend Barbara Kent read my last post and shared the following story with me. I twisted her arm and asked if I could run it here:

I agonize over which bananas to buy or when the bananas I have bought are too ripe to eat.  I always feel guilty if I do not manage to eat the bananas I buy before they turn brown and mushy.  Brown bananas remind me how poor are some of my choices and how out of order are my priorities.

As I read the words of Job (14:1-2) about the brevity of life and the words of Joshua (24:14-15) encouraging the people to choose whom they would serve, I thought about something my late husband Dan regularly quoted from an Erma Bombeck column: “Life is too short to eat brown bananas.”

Job might have used bananas instead of flowers to describe the fleeting quality of life.  Like flowers, bananas do not last long.  Life is a lot like bananas and flowers.

When I read Joshua’s words, I realized that making good choices helps to get priorities in order.  Or, is it the other way around?  Joshua counseled the people to choose whom they would serve.  His choice was made:  he had chosen to serve God!

Long ago Dan made the same choice Joshua made.  He chose to serve God.  That choice helps him to make other choices.  In a sense, making the right choice in who he would serve helped him get the priorities of life in the right order.

Dan kept a stained glass plaque of Joshua’s words in verse 15 hanging in the window by the front door of our house:  “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”  Whether the sunlight cascaded through the colors in the glass or the moonlight brushed the colors with shadows, all who entered Dan’s house were reminded of the priorities that guided his life and the life of his household.

Erma Bombeck was right: “Life is too short to eat brown bananas.”  More importantly, life is too short to serve other gods!

Lord, thank you for life, for choices, for priorities, for Dan, and for brown bananas.  Help me, like Joshua and Dan, to make the choices that set the priorities of my life in the right order.