"Too Familiar?"

“Too Familiar?”

One morning this past summer Karen and I were having breakfast in our enclosed Florida room. As we talked we suddenly realized we were hearing a train on the CSX line about half a mile away. It then hit us that the sound of a train had become so familiar that we often didn’t “hear” it. The same can be said for other sights, sounds and objects that have grown so commonplace that they escape our notice and become “a piece of the furniture” in our lives.

I’ve called 18 different dwellings home during my now ¾ century of life. Ten of them have been a mile or less from a railroad, some heavily traveled and others rarely used. By the time I got to college in Wheaton, IL I’d become desensitized to the noise but some fellow students who came from rural areas had trouble sleeping when a seemingly endless CNW freight train rumbled through town in the middle of the night. But they gradually became used to it and their rest wasn’t disturbed.

The Sunday before I sat down to write this piece our church choir (of which Karen is a member) sang a beautiful arrangement of Psalm 23 which included a fantastic men’s duet. The congregation loved it and gave an enthusiastic ovation. That day we went to lunch with another couple and part of our conversation centered around the anthem. We then realized that some parts of Scripture (including this Psalm) have become so familiar to us that we overlook their great significance. (John 3:16, the Good Samaritan story, the account of David and Goliath and many other parts of God’s Word can fall into this category.) Ironically it’s because they’re so important that they’ve become so well-known and we then run the risk of taking a “ho-hum” attitude towards the truth they convey.

In Acts 10:15 Peter was warned, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” Proverbs 30:5 reminds us that “Every word of God is pure….” (NKJV) and it mustn’t become so familiar that we forget what God’s telling us or render it unimportant by our actions. Remember, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful…so that the (people) of God might be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” (2 Timothy 3:16-17, emphasis added).

Grace and Blessings!

Jim McMillan

(With helpful input from Karen)