I’m much engaged these days in trying to finish the Leader’s Guide for Acts Of Faith. This has given me more trouble than I anticipated. I’m making progress, now down to the last three chapters of the first draft. I’ll finish one of those today and get started on another. Perhaps I’ll have it finished by the end of the weekend and will make a start on editing. I know that, as I progressed through the chapters, I changed the information I was putting into the Leader’s Guide. I’ll have to decide if I need to make many changes to the earlier chapters.

My post today will be somewhat brief. We made a trip to Texas in early October for a grandson’s birthday. It was just a week, but an event took place back at our empty house that I see as significant. Our downstairs clock stopped working. It’s batter powered, and of course I have to put in new batteries from time to time. I was working in The Dungeon, where the clock resides, and on the first day back noticed it had stopped running.

No problem, I thought. I’ll change the batteries. Alas, we were out of AA batteries. I put them on the shopping list, and promptly forgot to get them at the store even though they were on the list. Then I forgot to put them on the list for the next week. Finally, on my third trip to the store after our return, I got the batteries.

It took me almost another week before I cut open the package, took three batteries downstairs, and put them in the clock. And…nothing. The clock didn’t start. No problem, I thought. I took the batteries out and cleaned the terminals on the clock. Although the old batteries I removed looked okay, perhaps they had left a corrosive film that was preventing the new batteries from working. I put the new batteries back in and…nothing.

I double-checked to make sure the new batteries were in the correct way. They were. I came to a conclusion: The clock had quit working.

The clock is 36 years old. It was a gift to me on the occasion of my leaving Saudi Arabia to end my expatriate life there and return to the States, along with Lynda and our two pre-school children. It was from the Pilipino men I worked with. I had bonded with them, and they gave me this as a result.

The clock chimed, beginning at 6:00 a.m. until 10:30 p.m. One chime on the half hour, the number hours on the hour. From it’s location downstairs, we could just hear it where our reading chairs are in the living room. If the TV was off, that is, we could hear it, and I found it to be a comforting sound. I don’t know how much our guests who stayed in the guest bedroom downstairs liked it, sounding off louder for them at an early hour when all they wanted to do was sleep in.

It will be sad to discard this clock. It’s a link to an era, our expatriate life. It survived the journey home (since our shipment was already sent we had to carry it in our luggage through Europe to Rhode Island to Kansas City to Meade thence by car to North Carolina), at least one big fall off the wall (when hit with a ball thrown for the dog), more years in storage, and moves in Arkansas until it came to a permanent place on The Dungeon wall.

Throwing it away is breaking that link to our expatriate life. I know, it’s nearly 36 years since we returned from Saudi and over 29 years since we returned from Kuwait. We have many souvenirs of those times. Still, this was special. Sad to see it go, but nothing lasts forever.

Wednesday night I taught a class at church, on 1 Timothy 5:26 through 6:11, which includes the part about the love of money being the root of all evil. I used the illustration of going to the Middle East to pursue a better job for more money, and wondered if chasing the dollar like that was the right example to show for my children. Then to myself I wondered if, 38 years after going there, and 29 years after our return, if it wasn’t time to let this part of life go, to quit using examples from that. Just as disposing of the clock is sad, so is making a further break with my life from several decades ago, but it’s time.

I’ll remove the batteries from the clock, but will put it in the garage for a while. Who knows, maybe these batteries, brand new from Wal-Mart, were bad. One can always hope.