THE RUN AWAY REMOTE

THE RUN AWAY REMOTE

I know that the days of turning channels and turning the TV on and off by hand are long gone. Now it is the battle of the remotes. I don’t know about you all but we have a special container for our remotes. There are at least 5 or 6 in our living room. Well this story takes place in the bedroom. Every night we turn the TV on in the bedroom while we are getting ready for bed and usually watch it a few minutes before going to sleep. Arliss of course is king of the remote and it stays on the night stand on HIS side of the bed. Well on this night, he reached for the remote and it wasn’t there. He looked on the floor and under the bed and even in the covers but no remote. He started asking me - Did you get MY remote? Did the Grandkids come over today? Did someone come to look at our house today? (We do have our house for sale). I had not touched his remote and no the grandkids were not here and who would come to look at a house and steal a remote. He started looking everywhere- in the mean time - I was now ready for bed and I walked over and actually used the “on” button -amazingly the TV came on. I tried to tell him to forget it for this night but he was on a mission. It just would be awful to have to manually turn off the TV. I got rather tickled at him but he left the bedroom and started the search through the house. Now the remote was found on the table beside his chair. He brings the remote to me thinking I had done it. Well I didn’t do it and to this day no one knows how the remote got there. I will say though that the fact that it was on the table beside HIS chair makes it pretty obvious to me who was the guilty party.
Now for a spiritual application. I know the Lord allows these things in my life to teach me and this was no different. We are a very missionary minded church and we have visiting missionaries all the time. We try to give them our best as we so admire the work for God that they have been called to do. We take up special offerings and send them to missionaries in need. It is all good in itself - but like the remote - it is an easy way to support missions without us having to actually touch it personally. Please don’t misunderstand, I think we need to do all that but it isn’t the end. In Acts 1:8 - It says we are to go to Jerusalem and Samaria and all parts of the world. Well the Jerusalem is our home town. Sometimes God doesn’t want us to just support missions by remote. He wants us to go to that neighbor and tell them about the Lord, or take the new comer list and go knocking on doors. How about handing out tracks or mailing them in our bills. Believe me I am preaching to myself as well.
This world we live in today has everything to make our life easy but at the same time we have become lazy. There is no substitution for hands on visiting with people and sharing the gospel one on one.
Now when you pick up the remote maybe you should try to think if God might have some “hands on” work for you to do instead.