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Acts 9:36-43

Your Life in Sixty Seconds

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Acts 9:36-43

Your Life in Sixty Seconds

By Dr. Mickey Anders

Dan Hurley has won media notice from USA Today, Reader’s Digest, CNN.com and on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, but it wasn’t because of his jaunty red hat, silk bow tie, yellow blazer, two- tone saddle shoes or his button-down look.  Mr. Hurley made his name and his fame as a sidewalk performer. He’s not a mime, or a juggler, or a folk singer, or a sax player. Mr. Hurley plays the typewriter keys. He’s a “performance writer.” Clickety-clack, ziiiiiiip, ding!  He’s The 60-Second Novelist, and he’s good.

In 1983, Dan Hurley took his 1953 Royal typewriter onto Chicago’s Michigan Avenue to begin writing what he called “60-Second Novels.” Thinking it would be a one-time lark, he offered to interview passersby and write a story inspired by their conversation. The response changed his life: people lined up to pay $5 per story, pouring out their stories as if he were a confessor or Dear Abby. He quit his job as an editor to travel the country in search of stories, eventually writing the life stories of over 22,613 people and counting!

Hurley has listened as children, crack addicts, the homeless and the famous confessed their secrets and shared with him a lifetime of wisdom.  He has learned the real-life truth about love, fame, money, health and happiness. He has written his short novels about people like the homeless man living in a Brooklyn dumpster on Christmas, Iowa hog farmers who welcomed Dan into their lives, a little boy on his first day of kindergarten who wanted to grow up to be a bird, a Chicago woman who slapped Dan because she didn’t like her story, and two young women on leave from a Manhattan psychiatric hospital.

Just think of it!  Your life story in sixty seconds!  If you could have Mr. Hurley write about you in 60 seconds, what would he say? Would he speak of a life of love and devotion? Would he show you as unique? Would he succinctly summarize a life of purpose or a life wasted on all the wrong things?

Sixty seconds isn’t much time, but good stories don’t have to take long to tell. Many of the stories of the Bible come through in sixty seconds or less.  Take Dorcas (also called Tabitha), for instance. The writer of her story didn’t have a typewriter or a word processor, nor was he wearing yellow clothes. It doesn’t matter what the writer looks like. What matters is the story and the telling.

In some ways the miracle story of Dorcas’ healing is not that unusual. It follows the pattern of other miracle stories in the Bible. Indeed, the story’s details seem to go all the way back to the Elijah-Elisha cycle in 1 and 2 Kings.

In 1 Kings 17, Elijah raised the son of the widow of Zarephath from the dead.  At God’s instruction, he had gone to live with the widow and her son, but her son died.  She cried out to Elijah, “What have I to do with you, you man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to memory, and to kill my son!” (1 Kings 17:18).  Elijah stretched himself upon the child three times, and cried out to the Lord, “Yahweh my God, please let this child’s soul come into him again” (1 Kings 17:21). The Lord listened to the voice of Elijah and the boy lived again.

There is a similar sixty-second story in 2 Kings 4 about Elisha raising the only son of a Shunammite woman.  The child went one day with his father among the reapers, but the cried out “My head, my head” and shortly died.  They sent a messenger to the prophet.  Elisha sent his servant Gehazi to lay his staff upon the head of the child, but the child did not revive.  Finally, Elisha arrived.  The Bible records the story this way, “He went up, and lay on the child, and put his mouth on his mouth, and his eyes on his eyes, and his hands on his hands. He stretched himself on him; and the flesh of the child grew warm.”

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In our text for today, we learn the whole story of Dorcas in the short span of 94 words. A short story it is, but what a story.  Dan Hurley might have written it this way:

Title: What Dorcas Did. How She Lived, Died, Then Lived Again.

Dorcas devotes her life to good works and charity. She does a lot for people and does it all the time. She sews cloth together, turning out tunics and other comfortable clothing that friends wear – and eye admiringly – because Dorcas stitches them.

Who knows how to sew nowadays? Or knit? Or hook? Or bake? Or braid? Or give time for good works and acts of charity? Who takes the time? Dorcas does.

Her sewing makes her famous in Joppa, but her acts of kindness make her beloved. She is, like all of us – unique. And she is, to an extent – irreplaceable, indispensable. She does what others can’t, or won’t, do.

One day Dorcas gets sick and dies, leaving her community weeping and wondering – How are we going to replace Dorcas? Who can do what Dorcas did? Who can fill her spot among us?

“Peter!” they cry, “Dorcas is dead! Come save her! We need her!”

Peter comes. He prays. She lives again. Her good works and acts of charity continue. Her sewing continues, and the community survives intact. They don’t even have to try to replace her – which might have proved impossible, because who could ever do the good works Dorcas does!?  The End.

There it is; a life summed up in sixty seconds.  I wonder how we would sum up our lives in sixty seconds.  What would Dan Hurley write about you or me?

One night two pretty young women walked up to him at the corner of Columbus and 72nd Street in New York, and introduced themselves as Lyn and Suzanne.

“Out shopping?” he asked.

“We’re on day leave from the psychiatric floor of a hospital,” said Lyn.

“Seriously?  What’s the problem?” he asked.

“Manic depression,” said Lyn.

“I tried committing suicide so my parents committed me,” said Suzanne.

“But is life really so bad?” he asked. “I mean – isn’t there any good in life that you’d want to kill yourself?  You would have missed this beautiful day.”

“Sometimes I just forget about the good,” said Suzanne, “because there’s so much bad.”

So Dan Hurley wrote this for their Sixty Second Novel:

THE FORGETTING SICKNESS AND THE REMEMBERING RECOVERY

Lyn and Suzanne had this thing where they kept forgetting.  They would wake up in the morning and forget about the smell of a lake in the woods at dawn in the autumn. They would forget about being held by another human being. They would forget the feeling of getting really excited about something coming up, something big like Christmas, or something small like waiting for dinner to be served.

Or they would forget the sound of geese going north in the Spring. They would forget the taste of coffee in the morning when you wake up, and how the shower feels when you get in and it starts waking you up, and you push the bar of soap over you and your skin starts to tingle.

They forgot all sorts of things, like love and friends and hope. They forgot hearing all the traffic, joking with other people on the street.

Then they went to a nice place where doctors helped them to remember. And slowly now they are starting to remember.

But as they remember all these beautiful things, they also begin to remember the pain and the trauma and the difficulties, which is why they forgot the beautiful things in the first place.

But that is life. The pain AND the beauty, the good AND the bad.  And so we hang onto the beauty and the love and the happiness, we hang on strong, and remember it. Remember these good things. Remember to remember.  The End.

Here’s a sixty second autobiographical story by Bea Salazar published in 2000:

In 1990, I had undergone back surgery and was on disability. I was depressed and just trying to get through each day. One afternoon, when I was putting out the trash, I saw a little boy digging in a dumpster for food. I took him inside, made him a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and sent him home. Fifteen minutes later, there was a knock at my door, and I opened it to find six more kids standing there. “Is it true that you’re giving away peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches?” one of them asked.

I couldn’t believe that there was no one caring for these kids. It was summer, and school was out. They told me that their parents had to work. The next day, more children showed up, and more arrived the day after that.

When school began again, kids came and asked for help with homework. Volunteers and supplies from local churches and schools poured in. My landlord donated an apartment, and soon I had 100 children coming to visit each day. Ten years later, five of the kids have begun community college.

I never thought that making one peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich would grow into something that would affect so many lives – especially mine. Those kids pulled me out of myself. There was a point when I stopped thinking about my own pain and started concentrating on somebody else’s. It’s true that when you help others, you help yourself.  (Bea Salazar, “Is it true that you’re giving away peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches?” Fast Company, December 2000, 108.)

In his famous book, Seven Habits for Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey recommends that we begin with the end in mind. He suggests a simple exercise – imagine that you are attending your own funeral.  What would people say about you?  Covey suggests that such an exercise can change your life.

In fact, it did change one man’s life.  One morning in 1888 Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite, awoke to read his own obituary. The obituary was printed as a result of a simple journalistic error. You see, it was Alfred’s brother that had died and the reporter carelessly reported the death of the wrong brother. Any man would be disturbed under the circumstances, but to Alfred the shock was overwhelming because he saw himself as the world saw him. The “Dynamite King,” the great industrialist who had made an immense fortune from explosives. This, as far as the general public was concerned, was the entire purpose of Alfred’s life. None of his true intentions to break down the barriers that separated men and ideas for peace were recognized or given serious consideration. He was simply a merchant of death. And for that alone he would be remembered.

As he read the obituary with horror, he resolved to make clear to the world the true meaning and purpose of his life. This could be done through the final disposition of his fortune. His last will and testament–an endowment of five annual prizes for outstanding contributions in  physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace (the sixth category of economics was added later)–would be the expression of his life’s ideals and ultimately would be why we would remember him. The result was the most valuable of prizes given to those who had done the most for the cause of world peace. It is called today, the “Nobel Peace Prize.”

What if you saw the obituary written about you in a local newspaper?  Would you like that sixty second summary of your life?  What would it say?  Sometimes obituaries gloss over the real facts about a person’s life in an attempt to make the family feel better.  But what if it accurately told the truth about your life?  What would it say?  And would you be happy with what it said?  If not, what are you going to do about it?

Scripture quotations from the World English Bible.

Copyright 2010, Dr. Mickey Anders. Used by permission.