FINGERPRINTS ON THE WALL
A meditation by the Rev. Dr. James G. Kirk
Harundale Presbyterian Church
Text: “She was devoted to good works and acts of charity.”
(Acts
First
Second
This past Thursday the pre-school children dipped their hands in paint and put their handprint on a piece of colored paper that had this poem on it: “Sometimes you get discouraged because I am so small. And always leave my fingerprints on furniture and walls. But every day I’m growing—I’ll be grown up some day. And all those tiny handprints will surely fade away. So here’s a final handprint, just so you can recall. Exactly how my fingers looked when I was very small.”
When I saw them drying out in the hallway I almost cried. Our children grow up too fast and soon they’re out of the house and on their own. I tell parents of young children today to enjoy every day they have them. I remembered how I’d cried when my sons made that first trip to college. Things would be so different. They went from a time when you were the center of their universe and now that universe would forever be changed and changing.
That’s why grandchildren are so much fun. You remember all the things you did wrong with your own children and now have a second chance with the grandkids. Plus the fact that with grandchildren you can be their playmate and don’t always have to be the disciplinarian; let their parents do that. So, we play all the time, have adventures, go out to eat things we’d never agree to when their parents were young, wear them out and then hand them back!
And all the while, we see how their handprints are developing, or, to put it differently, how they are developing their own unique personalities. We hear about one of those unique personalities in our scripture this morning. The story’s about Tabitha whose Greek name is Dorcas. Her handprint is “She was devoted to good works and acts of charity.” We hear later on in the story how she was also a very good seamstress. When Peter arrives all the widows are gathered together in the upper room, where they have laid Tabitha, since she has recently died. They are showing him the tunics and other clothing that she had made while she was with them. Well, as the story proceeds, we hear how Peter raises her from the dead and “calling the saints and widows, he showed her to be alive. This became known throughout Joppa, and many believed in the Lord.” Such is the handprint of Tabitha.
“For over
30 years, Peter Gomes has served as a minister to the students of
“Young
people today are discovering that true happiness cannot be found in the culture
of materialism. Nor can it be discovered
in the patterns of the past, in lives based on the fantasy world of 1950s
sitcoms. Young people want and deserve
something better. They want a good life,
real happiness and an opportunity to do something worth doing. They want to be able to live their lives and
even offer them, if required, for something worthy of sacrifice.” (Peter Gomes,
The Good Life,
“What will
it take for me to make a good life, and not merely a good living?” Tabitha could have asked that same question
and that’s why she was devoted to good works and acts of charity. Pat Tillman was another one. He was “the man who had walked away from a
$3.6 million three-year contract with the Arizona Cardinals because there was
another uniform he wanted to wear. In a culture
obsessed with money, there’s something hard to believe about a person who turns
down that kind of offer for an $18,000-a-year job with the Army. And in a culture obsessed with fame, we
hardly know what to do with a guy who doesn’t even capitalize on the
story. From the minute he decided to
sign up, Tillman refused interview requests. What he did wasn’t a publicity
stunt. It wasn’t a career move. It was that ancient, compelling thing—a
sacrifice.” (Time,
Time Magazine tells us that Tillman “lacked both the size of a typical college linebacker and the speed of a running back, but he was dogged and smart. In his senior year Tillman was named Pac-10 Conference Defensive Player of the Year—no small trick for a guy who weighed 202 lbs. in a world where your average lineman looks like a major appliance with a helmet.” (Ibid.)
We’re
reminded again of what our pre-school kids did this past Thursday. “Sometimes you get discouraged because I am
so small. And always leave my
fingerprints on furniture and walls. But
every day I’m growing—I’ll be grown up some day. And all those tiny handprints will surely
fade away. So here’s a final handprint
just so you can recall. Exactly how my
fingers looked when I was very small.”
Tabitha put her handprint on the wall in the seaport city of
Thanks be to God,
Amen