An Old Prayer
I like to listen to old movies and musicals while I do my weekend chores. I've seen most of them so many times that I don't need to WATCH them. I just listen.
Last Saturday I was choring away and listening to "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers". When the heroine of the movie sits down at her first civilized meal with the Parnopy brothers, she offers an old prayer "Father, You have brought us through the wilderness to a good land. A land of wheat and game where we need never hunger......"
That's really quite an inspirational prayer to me, in its way. Being a history buff, I think about how that would have been to have crossed the Great Plains, to a destination of unknown temperament. Of course, you would THANK GOD to have lit in a good land.
But there's another side to it that intrigues me for our time. We live here in a settled country. The frontier is gone, and very few of us live far from a grocery store, a doctor, a dentist, etc. For most people in America, what you need (and what you want) is only as far away as you can drive in a few minutes. And still, a lot of us muddle through our lives feeling dissatisfied.
I think about a simpler day of greater struggles and smaller expectations. The small victories of a day were infinitely more important. Most people did work that yielded a visible result at day's end. There is great satisfaction in that. The sun went down, the day's labors were pretty much over, and there was time to just BE.
It makes me wonder about what became of this good land. Are we still reaping the joy and contentment that God put here for us?
Last Saturday I was choring away and listening to "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers". When the heroine of the movie sits down at her first civilized meal with the Parnopy brothers, she offers an old prayer "Father, You have brought us through the wilderness to a good land. A land of wheat and game where we need never hunger......"
That's really quite an inspirational prayer to me, in its way. Being a history buff, I think about how that would have been to have crossed the Great Plains, to a destination of unknown temperament. Of course, you would THANK GOD to have lit in a good land.
But there's another side to it that intrigues me for our time. We live here in a settled country. The frontier is gone, and very few of us live far from a grocery store, a doctor, a dentist, etc. For most people in America, what you need (and what you want) is only as far away as you can drive in a few minutes. And still, a lot of us muddle through our lives feeling dissatisfied.
I think about a simpler day of greater struggles and smaller expectations. The small victories of a day were infinitely more important. Most people did work that yielded a visible result at day's end. There is great satisfaction in that. The sun went down, the day's labors were pretty much over, and there was time to just BE.
It makes me wonder about what became of this good land. Are we still reaping the joy and contentment that God put here for us?
Comments
Post a Comment
Thank you for taking the time to visit me! I truly appreciate your comments!