As a part of the recent, festive, out of this world celebration, I was reminded that this old, round ball of dirt and water that we call “home” travels through space in a slightly squashed orbit. I’m certain that Mrs. Davis, my third-grade teacher, back in Stevenson Elementary School in Meridian, Mississippi taught me this, but I have slept since then, learned lots of other, more important “stuff” and have forgotten almost everything that I once knew!
Indeed, I have been recently reminded that, like the “wheels on the bus” that "go round, round, round,” every one of the sun-girdling planets certainly travels predictably around the sun. But, have you heard? None of them does it perfectly, or in what can be referred to as a “concentric” pattern. They actually orbit the sun, for sure, but they do it in, to lesser or greater extents, imperfect ways. And so, ipso facto, it is most linguistically correct to say that every planet, including our own, is “eccentric”!
I looked it up in the dictionary. Yes, “eccentric” may mean
“unconventional” or “slightly strange.” Sometimes this word means “a person of
unconventional and slightly strange behavior.” BUT, this word may also mean “of
a non-circular orbit.”
Still in the afterglow of the Aphelion Day partying, I have
been thinking a lot about eccentricity. If all of the planets are eccentric,
maybe I should not deny my own irregularity. I don’t know about you, but I have
always sensed that my own personal orbit was slightly squashed, flattened at
places. While I try my best to be conventional and normal, I also find points
in my life when I must stray from the prescribed circuit. When, after a successful
twenty-year career in higher education, I left the warmth and familiarity of
academia to become a local church pastor, some said, “He certainly is
eccentric!” When, at the end of my fifth decade of life, Janice and I moved our
lives from that comfortable home on the lake and all of the pleasures of
middle-class, suburban living to a third-world country, with two foreign
languages and cultures to learn, at least one person must have said, behind our
backs, “Wow! Eccentric people!” Maybe “eccentric” was one of the nicer
comments?
Now, don’t get me wrong. I believe in “concentricality”. (My
made-up, “eccentric” word!) I always must orbit my life, not around the sun,
but around an almighty, compassionate God Who has made Himself most completely
known through Jesus, the Christ. But, I honestly do not expect that I shall
follow that ambit exactly or precisely, for two reasons. 1. I am a limited
human being and I make mistakes – what the Bible calls “sin;” despite that
reality, I have been accepted by God, not by my concentricality, but by His all-encompassing
grace. 2. I am a unique, one-of-a-kind, human being, created distinctively and individually
by that same loving God and given the lifetime challenge of being no one else
but myself.
So, if I “march to the beat of a differ drummer,” blame it
on Mrs. Davis, if you must. If you think me in outer space sometimes, I’m just
travelling with my fellow eccentrics, the planets!
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