Blackballed With Balloons

We saw a birthday celebration yesterday at a local business. One of the employees had reached 40. Signs here and there read, "Over the hill". And all around were balloons: red, yellow, blue, and here and there black ones!

Why black? Through the years, we have never associated black with joy or celebration. Perhaps if we were of the black race, we would do so..."black is beautiful". Yes it is!

Although I love the daylight, and the colors of the day, sometimes I love even more the quiet beauty of the night. How peaceful, how quiet, how beautiful when you realize that only then can the stars come out.

Maybe 40 isn't "over the hill", but sometimes people who are getting older begin to wonder whether life holds much for them up ahead. Sometimes the eyes begin to dim...the hearing gets dis tant, and the health falters and fails. But, in truth, only when some of the noise and confusion of the chaotic world around us begins to slow down, and maybe even go away...only then do we begin to discover that night is but the wonderful prelude to another day.

Only then do we begin to see that God is preparing us, in the quiet times of retirement, for a Special Day...a Day so bright and glorious, so marvelously different than the one in which we have been living for three score years and ten, that truly "black is beautiful", and the night is not the end of anything, except the beginning of something uniquely new.

The apostle Paul had his complaints too. And in Romans 5:3ff, he says we may even be able to "rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts."

I'm a sucker for "hope". And I can't help believing that God hasn't "blackballed" us, but that He beautifully rewards us with all the colors of the rainbow, along with a certain amount of darkness, in preparation for an eternity with Him.