The Best Laid Plans
have, today, gone astray. I had my brush-clearing machine (a 40 year old piece of equipment called a “Hydro-Ax” that’s half the length of a school bus) fixed and greased. I’d fully intended to spend a couple of days over the Labor Day weekend clearing small trees and scrub brush from an overgrown five acre knoll that I’d about two-thirds cleared. About twenty minutes into the job, the big machine slid sideways, and I ended up with a cherry tree about a foot in diameter up against the cab, between the front and real wheels. While trying to work myself free, something broke in the transmission, and the machine now sits, awaiting a repair crew after someone with a chain saw removes the cherry tree. Fortunately, it’s in a place that the repair truck can be driven to, but, still, it’s a pain. As I left, some sort of fluid was dripping from the transmission, so I can assume that it is serious.
I have broken the machine (or, preferably, the machine has broken while I, coincidentally, was operating it) so often that I no longer feel embarrassed about calling the very nice repairman, to whom I will say on Tuesday morning, “Jim, the ongoing plan to provide full employment for the Knight Equipment Repair Company is succeeding beyond our wildest dreams.”
But, after I got home, I realized that spending an entire three day weekend cutting brush is my preferred form of hedonism. The great pleasure I get from looking at a newly cleared patch of land is, I hope, one reason I was put on earth. There is some justification in my joy of land-clearing in Scripture, so I have had no trouble convincing myself that my joy is Biblical in origin. Genesis 2:15. “And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to prune it.”
So, I do, and am rarely happier than when so doing.
Last month, I wrote a few columns about money, and what it isn’t. The first thing it is is impermanent. Good, healthy money changes in value like a thermometer. Instead of measuring temperature, the value of money is a reflection of a society’s honesty, integrity, love, military strength, courage, and freedom. The more negative a society is in any of these areas, the weaker its money becomes.
