NEWSLETTER  MAY 2021

Dear Family and Friends at Trinity,

     Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, when I was married and living in Sioux Falls, my husband’s niece Paula came for a visit.  She was about five at the time.  In an effort to find some activities that would both entertain and educate I took her to a reproduction of a Frontier Village located on the outskirts of Sioux Falls.

The village had everything you would expect a replica of a Frontier Village to have-a General Store filled with tourist-trap-type souvenirs, a pretend saloon, a one room school, a blacksmith’s shop, a simple chapel with a pump organ, and more.  It also had, as its main attraction, a herd of buffalo.

   There was a viewing platform, a vantage point from the village where you could just watch the buffalo, but

there was also a road that would allow you to drive down into the pasture area and view the buffalo “up close and personal”.  I asked Paula what she would like to do.  She asked if there was an admission fee to drive into the grazing area and I explained that there was but that the fifty-cent fee certainly would not be prohibitive.

Paula thought for a moment and then with five year old logic and wisdom asked, “Aunt Penny, do you think it really is wise to pay 50 cents to get trampled to death in a buffalo stampede?”

   Paula had weighed the fun adventure of the moment against the possible risk to the future and she decided the risk was not worth the potential loss.  Now I seriously doubt that we were, in fact, in any real danger of being trampled to death in an unprovoked, highly improbable buffalo stampede, but then again, who is to say?

  We often face similar through far more serious decisions in life.  We are called upon to make the choice between the impulsive action and the long range plan; between that which is  fun-for-the moment or that which  lasts-a-lifetime; the irresponsible fun or the responsible action.  It is so in our spiritual lives as well when we are called upon to decide between the temporal and the eternal, between the things and values of this earth or the things and values of God, between our way or God’s way.  All of those choices have ramifications.

  Next time you  must make a decision between the immediate and the future, ask yourself, “Is it worth it?”

Jesus in Mark 8:36 asked it this way: “What does it profit a man (or woman) to gain the whole world and lose his/her soul?”

Pastor Penny