Torch, Summer 1980

4 Dr. Suzanne Geyser Cummins "Lord I'm one, Lord I'm two, Lord I'm three, Lord I'm four, Lord I'm five-hundred pounds overweight. Ain't a shirt big enough to cover all this extra stuff; Lord I can 't go back home this-a-way!" The year was 1964, and the Cedarville College Choir was singing its way home from Omaha, Nebraska, and spring choir tour. We had done three things exceedingly well on that trip: sing, pray, and eat. Before we got back to the "ville," Clarence, our faithful and talented Greyhound bus driver, was to be fined at least twice for driving an overweight bus. Try as he might, he simply could not redistribute all the excess fat on that bus evenly enough to avoid detection by those interstate weigh-in truck and bus scales. We spent a good deal of time laughing at our slightly overweight plight. When you are between the ages of 18 and 22, you can afford to do that. After all, at that age you expect to live forever, and five or ten pounds of extra baggage around your middle is obvious– ly just baby fat. We would outgrow it, or surely we would run it off playing basket– ball or baseball or trying to stay two steps ahead of the dean of students. But it would go away. Of that much, we were sure. And even if it didn't, well, that was all right, too. After all, ten or fifteen extra pounds just gave you that good old American healthy glow. It was patriotic to be well fed; and, believe me, the closer to graduation we got, the more patriotic some of us looked! Sixteen years have passed since a bunch of us coined that fat song, and all of us have gone on to discover additional lessons of life that were not contained in high school or college text– books. Two of those lessons in particular have a tendency to confront us daily in somewhat annoying manner: the older we get, the easier it becomes to gain weight; and, conversely, the older we get the more difficult it becomes to lose the weight. Certainly these two axioms were far from the most important lessons we had discovered as time passed, but looking at them more closely and defining them more pointedly will uncover an even more integral problem for the Christian.