RIGHT

Our word for today is "RIGHT."

If I should ask you to give the opposite of "right," you probably would reply, "wrong or left."  If you had to pick one those two, knowing I am a minister, you would probably assume I would be thinking "wrong."  I do not mean you would think me wrong, but you would think the word I had in mind was "wrong."  Well, you would would be wrong.  Because the right answer is wrong.  I do not mean that the right answer is wrong but the answer to my query is the word "wrong."  Are you with me so far?

A few days ago I was to take some deer meat, which was very dear to us, because we do like deer meet, to a butcher and have the dear, deer meat ground.  I was given directions to the butcher's shop.  I was to travel down a certain highway, and then turn on a certain gravel road on the right.  So far, so good, I did that.  The butcher was the 6th drive down the gravel road.  But I thought it was on the right side of the gravel road.  After I had gone farther than I felt I needed to go, I was certain I had overlooked the drive or just perhaps I had misunderstood the directions and the drive was really on the left.  If this last thought was right, then right was wrong, and left was right.

So I turned around and headed in the opposite direction.  In a very short distance I met a mail carrier in a delivery car.  I went against my masculine nature and shamefully stopped to ask directions.  What made it worse, it was a lady mail carrier.  By the way her car had a steering wheel on the left but she was driving on the right and was seated in the middle.  Go figure!  Anyway she informed me as to the correct place I was looking for.  Now as I began to travel again, it occurred to me, that going this direction the driveway was on the right, so right became right and left became wrong.  Are you still with me?

Let me begin to make sense out of this whole affair by injecting a Scripture, which only occurred to me after I got back home.

Galatians 6: ⁹ We must not become tired of doing good. We will receive our harvest of eternal life at the right time if we do not give up.(NCV)

You see, my experience of getting my directions a little wrong, was not so much a matter of right and wrong, as it was a matter of right or left.  In life there is the very important issue of being right or wrong.  And as believers we are always to choose right.  We should never give up on doing the right thing over the wrong thing even when the right thing requires some backtracking.  We will eventual reap the harvest, we will achieve our aim, if we do not give up.  But often in the living out of our faith, even when we choose the right over the wrong, we still get mixed up with the right or left.  These are the little things in life that  make it so interesting.  Now if we allow it, they can be the things that frustrate us to the point of giving in to the wrong.  I could have not gone at all, and allowed the meat to spoil, and that would have been wrong.  It would have been wasteful.  I could have given up on my quest to find the butcher, allowed the whole incident to ruin my day, and go home and make my wife miserable, and still fail to take care of the dear, deer meat.  In the final analysis I thought it was quite humorous.  Life will never be perfect.  The answer is do the right thing instead of the wrong thing and don't sweat the rights or lefts.

I saw a bumper sticker today that is a perfect ending for my rambling meditation:

GET RIGHT OR GET LEFT!