One of the favorites from the Cheers TV show is the epitome of “Mr. I don’t Care.” You know him as Norm.
Yeah Norm, the guy who finds the glass does get empty. It doesn’t stay filled. It runs dry. Like life.
Do you know that frustration? No matter what you do... no matter what new job you get, what relationship you become involved with, what vacation you take, “thing” you buy.... the thrill, the satisfaction just sort of... runs out.
And so you’re left sitting there. Waiting... waiting for...meaning.
What we’re talking about is spiritual direction here. Norm’s seems stuck on his barstool. Because... he’s basically lazy. There really ARE people Like Norm.
One of them was a guy named Larry Walters.
This is... I swear... a true story. Larry Walters was a 33-year-old truck driver from Los Angeles and he lived in a small brick house in one of those track housing developments not far from the Los Angeles International Airport. And Larry Walters lived a pretty inconspicuous life. About the only real thing he did was, at the end of work each day and on weekends, he’d go out in his backyard and sit their in a Sears lawnchair with a six-pack of beer. Maybe two six packs on a nice weekend.
Day in and day out, year in and year out, Larry would sit there, sipping his beer in his fenced-in yard, looking at the identical postage stamp-sized fenced yards of his neighbors. Then, one day... I swear this is a true story... he got this idea. Wouldn’t it be neat, he thought, if he could get some of those weather balloons, fill them up and tie them to his lawnchair. Then he could float up above his little chain-link-fenced-in yard and give the neighbors a real sight as he sort of just floated there, fifty, a hundred feet off the ground quaffing his brew.
So, he did just that. He went to an army surplus store and bought 45 hot air weather balloons, filled them up had his neighbors hold them all down until he eased himself into his lawnchair. Then, with his six pack and a BB gun that he planned to use to shoot them out one by one when he wanted to come down, Larry Walters climbed in and said.. let go.
Instead of going 100 hundred feet off the ground, Larry Walters went up to 14,000 feet. He went up so fast and so high that he was too afraid to loosen his grip on the lawn chair to use the BB gun. The pilot of a Continental DC-10 radioed LAX that he just saw a man in a lawnchair go by.
Larry Walters was so high that they actually had to divert traffic around the airport. It took four-and-a-half hours to get him down and when he did, there was a crush of reporters and cameras and microphones.
“Why did you do it?” they asked.
Larry Walters said... and this was in all the newspapers: “Well, you just can’t sit there.”
I think his story illustrates better that all the careful dissection of doctrine and lofty words written by the theologians and philosophers exactly why, short of a belief in God... there is no meaning in this life.
Because... if there is no God... then there is no hope. If there is no God...then... what’s the point?
So many of us are so spiritually lazy. And life, like Norm’s beer glass, is empty.
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Mike Wendland - Online Christian Shopper www.onlinechristianshopper.com Mike is a pastor from a large Bible-believing church in the Midwest who founded the Online Christian Shopper Web ste to make it easy for Christians to practice lifestyle evangelism. His Web site sells quality Christian T-shirts and jewelry.
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