January 6, 2010 - A Little Souvenir?

     For some reason, this time of the year makes me think about Florida. Maybe it is the weather, or the warm ocean, or the Key Lime Pie, but the look of leafless trees, brown grass and cold clear skies makes me dream of the Sunshine State.
     I remember one of my favorite trips to Florida. It was the summer of 1966, when Marineland was the place to see and Sea World had not been invented. Being rather young and not knowing what I know now, I spent much of my time looking for exotic things I could bring home to show my friends. In 1966, Florida was another country from North Carolina. Any exotic artifact that would prove I had visited this tropical paradise would be just the ticket.
     I fell in love with a little alligator in Ocala, but my mom said, “No!” I had a beach bag filled with Spanish moss before my father reported that it would give me chiggers. I even had a little porcelain statue picked out until my mother whispered to my father that the inscription was actually a dirty limerick. His eyes got big, and we left it for someone whose mother was not so wise.
     I found a 35-pound piece of rubber off of a racing tire in Daytona. (I was sure it was from Curtis Turner’s car.) Dad just shook his head and said, “Not enough room.” I found a 3-pound dead barracuda in Miami. Even I decided against this souvenir, since this rotting fish smelled worse than my sister.
     Finally, I found The Souvenir. It was a Venus Fly Trap that I could grow myself. I brought it home, watered it “good,” put it in a sealed plastic bowl with the lid on and put it in the sun. I called my friends to come and gawk at this flesh-eating plant. We began rounding up flies around the neighborhood but found them to be pretty quick and evasive. We did come up with a tobacco worm, some ants, and a dead roach. We watered the fly trap again, put these critters in the mouths of the flytrap, put the lid back on, burped it, and put the whole thing back in the sun.
     For four days we kept the sealed plastic bowl containing the flytrap in the sunshine, fed it a wide selection of critters and varmints, gave it upwards of 4 gallons of water and spent most of our waking hours watching it. And on the fourth day, we officially pronounced it dead. We had successfully loved it to death. It had been smothered, drowned, overfed with bugs it had never thought about eating, and sufficiently cooked in the sun. So much for my exotic Florida souvenir.
     Such is often the plight of the Christian faith. We can hold it, love it, and keep it to ourselves until it is sufficiently a dead faith. We attend sunday school for years but never do anything with the learned knowledge. We talk about love, but we never this love outside of our church family. We are fed and nourished by the Holy Spirit, but we never use the spiritual energy. The Christian faith is nothing until we give it away, use it, and do something with it.
     I fear that the Christian faith may simply become an empty souvenir of a place we once visited.
Rev. Dan Martin is pastor of First UMC, Hendersonville. He can be reached at moose1953@hotmail.com