The Gimmicks in Our Lives

I was looking through some old city directories to see if I could find any information about my house. While doing that I ran across many curious items. One of them was an advertisement for a lightning rod company. The ad is from the 1904 Polk City Directory and was for a company in Allegheny City. I have not thought about lightning rods for a long time. You may have never thought about them. They seem to be more important in rural America. This advertisement brought me to think about a conversation that I had with my Uncle Buss almost sixty years ago. I asked him what the balls mounted on the lightning rod were for. He told me they were a gimmick of the lightning rod salesmen. They claimed that the balls would break if the rod was struck by lightning to indicate that the rod needed to be replaced. The only thing about that, he said, was that, if the rod was working, it would never be struck by lighting. What a lightning rod does is to electrically discharge the object they are attached to and the ground around it reducing the electrical potential between them and the cloud where the lightning develops keeping it from being struck. The lightning will simply strike something with a greater electrical potential somewhere else. My high school and college physics and electronic instructors confirmed my uncle’s explanation.

Now, I am not sure about the lightning rods pictured in the Hastings advertisement. They look too decorative to be effective. That is how it is sometimes in our lives. Instead of looking inside of ourselves we spend a great deal of time and money on gimmicks that only make us look good on the outside. You know people like that and you, if you are honest with yourself, have bought into those gimmicks – at least occasionally. That is what Lent is about. It is a time to look deep within our lives to see how we have bought the gimmicks and deception of others. We have spent more time and money on fitting in with the world than making the world a better place. We have been made children of God and ambassadors of Jesus not because we have lived and acted perfectly but because Jesus did. We the undeserving who have served our own selfish desires have been made God’s children and called to a task of sharing God’s love. So get rid of the gimmicks in your life and put on Jesus. It is not your outward appearance that matters anyhow. What matters is God’s gift of love. You are called to go into the world telling the story of Jesus and sharing God’s love. Use your Lenten journey to strengthen your resistance to the hollow gimmicks of the world and open your hearts up to God so that you may be able to share love, peace, and hope with all.