It All Smells the Same…

I traveled last week to Oklahoma City for a conference.  Accompanying me were three other team members.  We had about four hours before the first scheduled event.  As we traveled to get the rental car, I told them, “Now look what there is to see in Oklahoma City, or you will wind up seeing what I want to see.”  To my surprise, no one pulled out their phone and began looking for interesting places in Oklahoma City. 

We got in the rental minivan, and I said again, “What do you want to see in Oklahoma City?”  There was a pause in their conversation, and then they continued discussing an unrelated subject.  I pulled onto the Interstate to Downtown and said yet again, “Have you decided what you want to see in Oklahoma City?”  This time I was greeted with, “Whatever you want to see is fine.”  I tried to warn them, “What I want to see in Oklahoma City is probably not what you want to see.”  My team said they trusted me to lead them to interesting sites in Oklahoma City. 

They were a little surprised when I headed for Stockyard City, a neighborhood where the Oklahoma City Stockyards is located.  I knew we were getting close when we passed an eighteen-wheeler pulling a cattle trailer. 

I grew up in the cattle business.  Our family has owned the Buckhorn Ranch for one hundred and sixty-one years.  My Grandfather and my Uncle purchased the Okeechobee Livestock Market and turned it into the largest Livestock Market in Florida.  My cousins, Jeff and Todd, still own the market.  My cousin Kelly, along with my Skipper cousins, are cattle-brokers, buying and grading cattle and shipping them to Western feedlots.  During my seminary days in Louisville, when I got homesick, I would go to the Bourbon Stockyards and watch the cattle sale.  It smelled like home. 

I wanted to see the Oklahoma City Stockyards, the largest livestock market in the world.  They have survived for over a hundred years, right in the middle of town.  We wound up on the backside of the Stockyards, driving the only minivan insight.  Stretching over the pens were elevated catwalks.  I parked and said, “Let’s take a look.” 

I am pretty sure the catwalks were not up to OSHA standards.  They were solid but reached by rickety stairs.  A powerline ran next to the catwalk, so close you could touch it.  Stretching out as far as you could see were cow pens, full of – you guessed it – cattle.  About half a mile away was a large brick building, the auction house. 

Men were moving and sorting cattle right below us.  I explained to my team members what they were doing when a cow got by one of the men.  He began to use four-letter words that my team members may not have heard before, but I heard them many times; in fact, I myself use them on occasion.  My Uncle Tiny, a country Baptist preacher, said God made certain four-letter words so cattle could understand you. 

The stockyards smelled like… stockyards. Cows tend to have loose bowels when they are nervous, and believe me, cows get nervous in a stockyard.  There was about eight thousand head of cattle in the pens, give or take a few hundred.  Believe me when I say there was a lot of nervous material left on the ground.  Underneath all this material was brick.  More than once, we saw a cow slip on the muck and fall.  It is hard to get much traction. A front-end-loader went by, hauling out a load of the accumulated material. 

I could have stayed there all day; I was in my element, I was among my people, I was smelling the smells of home.  But it was suggested to me there might be other interesting things to see in Oklahoma City.  Before I left, I took a picture of the Stockyards and sent it to my brother and my cousins Kelly, Todd, and Jeff.   

Kelly sent me back a picture of his wife Elizabeth, standing on the same catwalk.  They had visited a few years earlier.  I told Kelly he really knew how to impress a woman.  He replied she would have rather been shopping.  My cousins Jeff and Todd have made that trip too.  Jeff texted me back, “Big place! But smells the same as it does everywhere.” 

I thought about that.  Processed cow digestive material smells the same in Florida, South Carolina, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and just about everywhere.  Processed grass is processed grass. 

I thought about sin.  It is so easy to look at my sin and think “It’s not so bad.  I’m not hurting anyone.  I’m not as bad as that guy in the news.”  But the truth is, sin is sin.  It smells the same.  When it gets processed through our souls, we wind up standing in it.  Sin makes it hard to get traction in life.  Sin accumulates over time. When we attack sin ourselves, we would be like one man in the Stockyards with a shovel trying to clean it out while more is being made every day. 

I think my life is like the stockyards.  I have accumulated a lot of sin in my life.  It limits me.  But the good news is I have a Savior who cleans out my sin, who cleans me up, and who sets me on a different path.    

Have you done a smell test of your soul lately?  Maybe you need to turn over your life to the Savior who will clean you up.

Why There Must Be Justice; Thank God for Mercy…

I was in Oklahoma City this week for a conference, which happened to be the twenty-sixth anniversary of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. 

To refresh your memory, on April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh drove a Ryder rental truck loaded with 4,800 pounds of explosive materials into a drop-off zone under a day-care center located in the building.  A few minutes earlier, he had lit a fuse.  He locked the truck and walked away. 

The bomb exploded at 9:02 AM that morning.  Within seven seconds, one-third of the Murrah building collapsed.  One hundred and sixty-eight people died, including three pregnant women.  I was told by a local pastor that the church he served, located across the street from the Murrah building, had its building lifted nine inches off of its foundation and then slammed back down.   

Timothy McVeigh and his accomplice, Terry Nichols, were quickly apprehended.  They were tried in federal court for murdering federal officers.  McVeigh was convicted on eleven counts of murder and conspiracy, sentenced to death, and was executed on June 11, 2001.  Nichols was found guilty of constructing a weapon of mass destruction and eight counts of involuntary manslaughter of federal officers.  He was sentenced to life in Federal Prison. 

Shortly after Nichols’ conviction, family members of other victims began to agitate for a state trial.  Their contention was the crime of murdering Federal Officers had been recognized, but their loss also cried out for justice. 

Wes Lane was the District Attorney for Oklahoma City at that time.  Since retired, he spoke at the conference I attended.  He talked about the pressure he faced.  “It seemed like everywhere I went in Oklahoma City, people wanted to talk to me about bringing charges against Nichols.  Many people had grown weary of the tragedy and wanted to move on.  Victims’ families said they could not move on until there was justice.” 

As he spoke those words, I understood.  Though I have never lost a family member to such a tragedy, it was not hard to feel profound empathy for victims’ families.  Imagine kissing your spouse goodbye in the morning, not realizing in ninety minutes their life would end and your world would change forever.  There would be daddys’ chairs forever vacant, mothers who would never again hold their children, and little children who had just begun to walk, who would never take another step.   

You cannot let a crime like that go unpunished.  There is something in our souls that demands justice.  The most fundamental understanding of justice rests on the idea of equality.  If you make things unequal between yourself and another, say, by robbing another person, justice demands repayment in the form of money or time.  If you rob another person of their life, justice demands something to equalize the relationship. 

Wes Lane told us the decision to prosecute Nichols was his alone to make.  He decided to prosecute Terry Nichols in State Court on 161 charges of murder.  A jury of twelve took five hours to decide he was guilty of all charges.  They deadlocked on the question of the death penalty.  Judge Steven Taylor sentenced Nichols to 161 consecutive life terms without parole;  Nichols will never leave prison alive. 

After the trial, the daughter of a woman killed in the blast came up to one of the prosecutors and said, “Thank you.  Before now, no one has been held accountable for my mother’s murder.  Thank you.” 

A heinous crime demands justice.  We see it so clearly in the cases of McVeigh and Nichols.  But imagine you are a God who is pure, without fault.  You create a perfect world, put people in it.  You give them one rule.  They break it.  You reach out again and again.  They keep breaking your rules.  They deny your existence.  You offer love and grace.  They laugh at you.  You send messengers.  They ignore some and kill others.  Finally, you arrive on the scene yourself, having taken a human body.  The best legal system of that time and the best religious system of that time conspire to murder you. 

What does justice require?  How can the relationship be equal?   

This is where we all start.  Paul, the great thinker, said it like this, “All sin and fall short of the magnificence of God.”  It means in my own way, and in your own way, we make our relationships with God unequal.  You and I have known the right thing to do and done the wrong thing anyway.  We make rules for ourselves that we cannot even follow (“I will never drink that much again…”).   

So God, who is rich in mercy, lets his own death, the death of Jesus, be the payment to bring the relationship back after we have broken it.  He knew there was no possibility we could pay the price to make the relationship whole again, any more than Terry Nichols can serve 162 life sentences in a row.   

If I compare myself to Terry Nichols, I can feel good about myself.  When I compare myself to God, I realize how far I fall short.  It takes God’s mercy for both of us. 

When you realize this, you begin to understand how rich God is in mercy.  If you do not understand that God has enough mercy to cover Terry Nichols’ sins as well as your own, you really do not understand mercy at all.