Maybe I’m not Applying Myself

It’s 10:31 a.m., and I’m already having an interesting day.

Every day I ask God to schedule my time and prevent it from being wasted. You would think the answers would be obvious. I would get up and clean and arrange and repair. I would study. I would help this or that person. It’s not like that.

God loves the sneak attack.

I watch the tube more than I used to. I watch when I’m taking the birds out for air, and I am hopelessly addicted to mealtime TV. But TV is terrible, so I have had to master Youtube and the DVR. If you can connect your PC to your TV, and you can learn to use the DVR well, you will always have something worth watching.

Okay, often. Not always.

I started recording old movies, because I felt like my cultural literacy was expiring. There are some movies everyone should watch, simply to have the experience in common with other people. There are also some old flicks that got very little attention, yet which have something to recommend them.

This weekend I watched Canon City, which is a 1948 movie named for a prison town in Colorado. It currently hosts the United States Penitentiary, an all-supermax facility. It’s the king of all American prisons. It’s the closest thing we have to hell. It’s where we put people we really, really do not want to see among decent people again.

Supermax is where you go when the thought of you escaping is too much for the corrections people and your judge to bear.

The movie was about another prison in Canon City; the Colorado State Penitentiary.

Canon City is a docu-drama. Some of the players were actual convicts and prison staffers, and it was about a real escape that took place in 1948. One of the escapees was James Sherbondy, a man who murdered a deputy when he was 17.

In the movie, Sherbondy is a model prisoner. He runs the prison darkroom. When the other prisoners come to him to try to get him to hide guns in the darkroom, he turns them down, hoping instead to make parole. They sneak the guns into the room against his will, and he decides to go along with the plan.

When the convicts escape, Sherbondy is the last one caught. He invades a home and holds the family hostage. One of the children, a little boy, has appendicitis, and the mother pleads with Sherbondy to let her take him to the hospital. After she promises to keep quiet, he lets her go. That actually happened.

Prior to the appendicitis scene, Sherbondy (the film version) stands up and makes a whiny speech about how hard his youth was, and he tells the family crime doesn’t pay. He praises the deputy he killed.

Of course, he gets captured, but not until the husband, moved by Sherbondy’s behavior, tries to drive him past the police.

Naturally, I had to look this up.

James Sherbondy killed deputy sheriff Oscar Meyer (his real name) during a traffic stop. Sherbondy was a truant and a thug. Meyer, who foolishly did his job unarmed, confronted Sherbondy, and Sherbondy shot him in the chest. Sherbondy fled in Meyer’s car and left him to die. A good Samaritan stopped, and Meyer fingered Sherbondy before he died.

Sherbondy never expressed remorse for the killing. He lived to be 49 years old, and he never said he was sorry.

Sherbondy was eventually paroled. He got into trouble again when the cops stopped a car he was riding in. They were looking for the three other occupants, not Sherbondy. Unfortunately, Sherbondy was armed, and he had some pipe bombs with him. He shot a policeman four times, and the police killed him.

There was a surprising deep message in the film’s narration. The narrator said the prison housed people who always had to have things their own way, and who were willing to break the rules to make it happen. That is a perfect summation of the criminal mind. I actually heard a psychopath say she took drugs because of the stress she felt when she didn’t get her way.

Why relate all this? Because it’s a lesson in misplaced sympathy.

James Sherbondy was hopeless. He was never rehabilitated. He tutored kids and did prison jobs in order to get time taken off his sentence, but he remained a criminal. Releasing him was a mistake that got a good man shot. It was a waste of effort.

The world is full of Sherbondys. I am related to at least one. They’re not rare. Like the clay bottles in the Bible that can’t be reshaped once the necks become stiff, people reach a point where they can’t be fixed, and the only rational thing to do is to put them in hell where they can’t torment the rest of us or contemn God any longer.

You can’t tell who is who, because you can’t see men’s hearts. A long time ago, I learned that I can’t tell when people are lying to me, and I can’t tell who is or is not worth saving. We tend to look for existing goodness in people. That’s wrong. The thing that qualifies people for help isn’t goodness; it’s the potential to continue becoming more good.

A child molester in a federal penitentiary may be worth more of your time than your local priest.

I wasn’t trying to connect molestation with the priesthood, but I’ll leave that anyway.

If you can’t change, you’re much worse off than someone who is filled with iniquity and evil yet who is willing to admit fault and submit to God.

Pride is what makes improvement impossible.

Our culture is in love with pride right now. We have become convinced that it’s a good thing. This is a new thing for America. In the past, we always thought pride was dangerous. Now we cultivate it.

Because of our love of pride, necks are stiffening all over the place.

The rise in immorality is very bad. It’s bad when we sin. But the thing that is bringing judgment on us is the pride more than the sin. You can get past sin and please God, but that’s not possible if you’re proud. Pride is a vaccine against sanctification.

I bring this up today because I keep feeling like it’s time for me to withdraw even more than I already have, and I think bad things are in our near future. Maybe I should say “your” near future, because I don’t see it landing on me.

I feel like God is helping me understand his actions before he takes them. We are becoming too proud to help, so abandonment will be God’s only rational option.

I don’t require any explanation from God. It’s not my place to demand one. But it’s interesting.

Sooner or later we will reach a critical point, and America’s protection will be gone in a hurry. We may be there right now.

I feel like it’s time to cut way back on the list of people I pray for. You’re not required to keep priming a pump on a dry well. You put in the time God thinks is appropriate, and then you move on. Hopefully there are some people out there who will respond better.

If you’re Spirit-led, you can’t really waste time. Everything is redeemed. Even the time you spend watching Turner Classic Movies. Things are planned in advance. They’re not always obvious.

I don’t know what’s going to happen, but stay in prayer and keep your knees bent. It’s working for me.