Apostolic Friends Forum - Old Hats, Saints, and Other Anomalies

This is a post I made on another forum that a friend copied and pasted to the blog I am supposed to be contributing to.

I thought I would post it here for your perusal...

I was just thinking this morning about an old hat of mine that hangs on a bedpost in a bedroom down in deepest Oklahoma.

That hat, a Resistol straw, used to occupy my noggin about five months out of the year back in my younger days when I was riding herd on cattle and not saints.

It was expensive, for a straw hat, at the time I bought it. But a hat is one of those things it doesn't pay to skimp on.

One day not long after I had bought the hat, I was riding a paint horse named Popcorn. That was a good name for him, because he would go to popping at the most inopportune times.

I had been gathering cattle down in Blackfox Holler, and was coming back up a long, rocky ridge. It was a real windy day, which makes nervous horses a little more nervous, and to make a long story short, old Popcorn caught me napping and broke in two, summarily unloading me right on my head.

I was young and resilient, so my first concern was for my new hat...I picked it up, and was able to take my hand and pop it back into shape, with nothing but a small crease to show where the damage had been. No big deal--it was inevitable, and things like that add character. No harm done.

Time went on, and I was in the stud pen at an outfit I was working for breaking horses, to get a mare bred to the stud the rancher owned.

Old Jet, the stud, got a little excited and knocked ny hat off with his head, and then to add insult to injury, pawed it with a front hoof, mashing it way out of shape.

I picked up the hat, dusted it off as best as I could, and punched it back into shape--pretty much. It wasn't the same, but still looked all right for a work hat.

Things like this kept happening. And I kept working it back into the best shape I could every time something else came along and flattened it.

But there was a subtle change taking place in my old Resistol...the fibers in the straw were beginning to break down. Every time it was crushed, they became weaker, and were less able to hold their original shape.

Today, that hat, now a shapeless rag, hangs in my old bedroom in my Granny's house. She is a sentimental soul, and won't let me throw it away. She says it reminds her of happier times when I lived there with her, and she was taking proper care of me, unlike my wife, who has never quite catered to me like Granny thinks she ought to.

What, you ask, does this have to do with saints?

As a pastor, I have seen some folks who remind me a lot of that old hat.

Getting crushed by the same struggles and the same weights and sins over and over again. The procedure is repetitious--fall for the same trap, get up, get back in some kind of shape, and go on only to do it again.

Trouble is, when you don't learn to over come, and just rely on mercy and grace and the sweeteness of repentance, at some point, the fibers of your character can become broken down to the point that you have a hard time holding anything resembling your original shape.

It is not a matter of God's grace being able to keep or restore; it is simply a fact of life and a principle that you can't violate without suffering--repentance required determination to change. Relying on the restoration process like it is some kind of Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card will result in an eventual brakdown of the basic fiber of your soul to the point that it will require a miracle to get you back into shape again.

So anyway, my prayer today is the title of the old Murrell Ewing song--"Don't Let Me Take Advantage of Your Grace."