Yellow Fly Paper – III

A little over a week ago we had a selective storm in the Richmond, VA area. It was selective in that it didn’t treat every area the same. At the office where I work, west of Richmond, it was like the tornado in the Wizard of Oz, at any moment I expected to see a pleasant-looking gal riding through the air on her bicycle laughing that she had my little dog.

Yet, on my 35-mile drive home there was little evidence of a severe storm for most of the way. I later found out that only five miles from our home there was severe damage – with a tree splitting one house in half.

At our place a lightening strike blew out the transformer on the utility pole, knocking out our electric service and frying our air conditioning system. Since we are on a well this also affected our water supply. Joy, joy, joy! At any rate, that’s how James says we should view these things in the first chapter of his NT letter.

Now you may be asking what this has to do with yellow fly paper ribbons – I’m surprised you haven’t guessed. Here’s a hint:

A couple of days after the storm I was talking with a coworker about her commute home the evening of the storm. Because the area around our office had many traffic lights disabled, traffic – which on a good day can be challenging – was especially bad. She talked about how rude people were, not allowing others to pull into traffic, blocking them from doing so, faces with scowls on them; you get the picture.

What does this have to do with yellow fly paper?

It doesn’t take much to remove civil constraint from society. Just make us uncomfortable, just deprive us of traffic lights, and let us show you what we can do. So much of the way we live is nothing more than submission to the police power of government and the veneer of society – a veneer easily pulled away. We are, after all, a soft people. We are morally soft, we are physically soft, and it doesn’t take much for us to justify rudeness and worse.

I don’t think you can have much social veneer with fly paper in your house; so I’m not sure that we are all that better off without yellow fly paper. I mean, who are we kidding anyway?